Knowing your customers: the importance of POS data

Thanks to advanced technologies such as point of sale software and the subsequent ability to collect vast amounts of data, construction industry traders and builders’ merchants are better able to connect with their customers and form stronger long-term business relationships than ever before. In the retail industry, having access to customer data is vital to ensure that resources are not wasted, promotions and sales are cost-effective, marketing efforts are successful and that customers always come back for more.

Regardless of the size of your business, attracting loyal, returning customers is the key to growth and expansion. In order to do so you’ll need as much POS customer data as you can get your hands on, so here’s how you can put the customer data available to your business to good use in future…

Customer value recognition

When a returning customer gets in contact you ought to recall more than just their name. You need to recognise a customer’s value to the business as accurately and as quickly as possible, and be able to use that information for every possible interaction. Whether your customer meets you face-to-face or gets in touch over the phone, you need instant access to information that provides, for example, a history of their past purchases or information on any late payments. If the data reveals that they are a new customer then they might be the perfect candidate for an up-sell, while if they are a loyal customer they will be more suitable for retention initiatives. Customers with poor payment histories, however, might be best avoided entirely. You need to know all of this information before you engage with any of your potential consumers.

Promotions

Not all of your customers will want or need to receive the same information on your latest promotions or deals, so rather than waste your time and theirs you should look to your data to help you better target your audience. By using your point-of-sale software to see what certain customers have bought in the past, the time of year they have bought the products and the quantities in which they bought them, you can gain a good idea of what they might want to hear about in the future. Storing all important customer details on your database will enable you to locate information instantly and get in touch at the click of a button, making targeted marketing promotions easy and far less time-consuming.

Protect profit margins

One of the best ways to attract customers is to offer fantastic deals and discounts that they simply cannot resist, but in order to protect your profit margins you’ll need to carefully monitor the number of discounts you can afford to offer. Protecting your margins should be one of your highest priorities, and fortunately your point-of-sale software can enable you to control costs diligently and make smart marketing moves. Using your software to determine how much you sell of each product will help you to introduce competitive pricing to help trim margins. Multi-tier discounting, for example, offering large discounts on certain groups of products with more competition and lower discounts on others, can also help in that you are making up for what you are giving away on other products.

While customer data is often used by businesses to improve the quality of customer service, the data provided by our Integrity Trader retail software enables users to do much more than that. If you’re interested in finding out more about the benefits intelligent retail software can offer your business, why not get in touch with a member of our team today?