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How to improve your store performance in the run up to the holiday season
It’s a great time for retail as consumer confidence returns after the pandemic. As we enter the busiest shopping period of the year, this holiday season can make or break the whole retail year.
Retailers need modern in-store technology more than ever if they want to meet today’s omnichannel demands and get through the current global economic challenges.
It may not feel like the right time to be investing in new technology, however stores that continue to rely on legacy systems will quickly get overtaken by the retailers who are embracing next-generation tech to offer an elevated customer experience.
Store systems must be capable of offering the right loyalty offers and promotions to customers based on customer type, brand or location to provide a more personalised shopping experience and ultimately increase your store takings.
How can next-generation retail tech improve store performance?
Customer experience is King! It’s the key factor to increasing your in-store sales. Your customers don’t want to wait a long time for an associate to assist them or stand in a long queue to checkout. Today’s shoppers want speed and convenience. Therefore, stores need to operate on a modern store system that can support multiple in-store point of sale devices including fixed POS, mobile POS, PED-less payments.
1. Next-level self-checkout experience
With modern SCO services, customers can complete their transactions independently to speed up the shopping process. The challenge here for retailers is to offer the same in-store personalised promotions at the fixed POS to customers using self-checkout. This is where a unified commerce platform like Enactor can enable a retailer to deliver a seamless customer experience across multiple in-store devices and channels.
2. Personalised promotions
Customers love promotions and offers, especially when they are personalised. So how can retailers personalise offers? Retailers need to follow a customer’s digital footprint using a next-generation POS, the retailer can gain a 360 view of the customer and be able to store data about the customer preferences, behaviour and purchases to establish a long-term relationship.
Also, retailers can increase their footfall by offering store credits to online shoppers. This is only possible if the store system is capable of connecting the physical and digital worlds together. Whatever the channel, customers data should be viewable in one place and the customer experience should be seamless across them..
3. Inventory Management
Today’s customers need fast delivery. They are even willing to pay extra to receive their orders on the same day. To optimise delivery, retailers require a single pool of inventory where customers can view real-time inventory and place orders, return or exchange items from anywhere. Also, by offering a next-level endless-aisle solution for customers, you’d not just impress customers but save your lost sales too.
How can retailers improve their store performance with Enactor?
1. Genuine Point-of-Service that connects all channels
More than just a point of sale, Enactor offers unmatched features and benefits to retailers to improve their store performance. Enactor combines the digital and physical channels where store associates can easily view loyalty details, customer open baskets and wish lists in order to tailor promotions.
2. Headless commerce architecture to enable rapid change
Creating highly personalised customer experiences and a seamless journey across multiple devices and channels is one of the reasons headless commerce is now indispensable in today’s retail world. As a headless solution, the Enactor platform allows complete flexibility in changing front-end apps without affecting the other back-end apps. The decoupled architecture gives the retailer more control over their POS system enabling them to innovate quickly and change business processes easily to meet customer and emerging market demands.
3. A single pool of inventory for fast delivery
Enactor offers retailers a single inventory view so retailers can easily manage and deliver items to customers from the nearest store. This results in cheaper and faster same-day delivery capability. Furthemore, retailers can switch entirely to operating as dark stores during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic in order to generate more cash by acting as a distribution centre.
We’re really excited about the flexibility and agility Enactor OMS will give us and see this as a key differentiator and competitive advantage going forward. We are proud of our Omnichannel offering to date but we need to push this to deliver greater insights and customer experience given the changing retail challenges. Customer behaviors and expectations are constantly evolving and Enactor OMS will enable us to meet and exceed those expectations. We will look to provide a consistent, seamless customer journey regardless of when and where our customers want to interact with us.
Enactor is genuinely a next-generation platform that helps retailers improve their store performance by managing diverse business and customer demands with a single platform. Retailers choose from a suite of out-of-the-box features and also have the freedom to extend the front end of the platform and add new applications themselves. Fast deployment means we can get a system up and running across any device in AWS or Azure in minutes, and to your stores in just weeks!
