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If you thought point of sale (POS) systems reached their peak innovation years ago and are not worth further consideration, it’s time for a rethink says Aptos’ Zaki Hassan
More investment and innovation are happening in the POS space right now than ever before in my 25-year career in retail technology. But why, you ask?
Ask a dozen retail pundits and you’ll get a dozen different answers. Well, here’s mine:
- The shopper’s purchase journey is more varied than ever. Shoppers want speed yet attention. They want personalisation but also anonymity. These expectations require new in-store operational requirements and demand new POS functionality.
- Wage pressures are resulting in less store staff, creating the need for technology that helps increase employee efficiency and productivity.
- Retailers are frustrated with ongoing costs and extended timelines to update legacy systems. They are turning to cloud-native applications that make adopting new features/versions/configurations fast and painless – at the head office and in store.
I talk to retailers constantly about their technology transformation initiatives, which address these very situations. Here are the top three reasons a modern POS solution is the answer to their problems:
1. Grow revenue while streamlining omnichannel operations
Modern POS solutions can seamlessly help store staff flex between selling and fulfilling.
Imagine this: with a single device, a store employee can process a click-and-collect order for one customer, help another customer look up available inventory at a different store and place an endless aisle order, and then coordinate pick/pack/ship for other customers’ ecommerce orders being fulfilled from that store location.
2. Elevate customer experiences with personalisation
As mentioned, employees are being asked to wear a lot of hats. Yet there is nothing more important than their ability to engage with and satisfy each customer who walks through the door.
Store employees need to be able to better serve customers right in the moment. New technology can enable employees to see key customer data and trends, such as loyalty information, sales and returns information, and average purchase history at a quick glance.
Personalised product recommendations, product ratings and reviews, pop-up messages (e.g. ‘Wish the customer happy birthday and offer them a birthday promotion’), and much more all contribute to empowering store staff to elevate their interactions with each shopper.
Best of all, that employee doesn’t waste time or energy grabbing a different device or logging into a different system to access important customer information, it’s all available via the POS.
3. Simplify store operations with the cloud
A cloud-native POS solution offers retailers’ IT organisations optimal ways to manage configurations, deploy updates, gain real-time insights and scale performance centrally and with zero disruption to stores.
Gone will be the days when every register in every store needs to be updated when software versions or configurations change.
Modern POS ushers in a new era of store technology management – and with it an approach that saves the retailer’s IT and store teams a lot of time, money and frustration.
Interested in learning more about why retailers are making the move to modern POS solutions? Visit Aptos’ modern POS resource centre here.
Zaki Hassan is general manager for EMEA and APAC at Aptos. In this role, Hassan looks after Aptos’ European and Asia-Pacific business, defining and executing the overall go-to-market strategy while overseeing sales, solution consulting, professional services and delivery teams.
