Moving from the POS Legacy to Digital Omni-Channel
Blog: NASSCOM Official Blog
The consumer retail industry is experiencing change at a breakneck pace. Since the future of selling is everywhere, it is the digital impact on the Omni-channel through which the retailers are starting to transform their customer relationships. The purchase dynamics of the consumers help to alter the retail landscape aligning it to needs and capabilities. Selling across multiple marketplaces was a difficult task. The various channels across a region added complexities in different retail activities, apart from the back-office administration in the conventional retail format.
The traditional retail pattern is going through massive digital transformation. The old process focused on point of sale (POS), up-selling, cross-selling, consumer demographics, and buying preference, wasting a lot of time and energy. The foresightedness of this conventional approach has routed to Omni-channel selling and shunning the POS legacy. The conventional retail business model is taking a quantum leap by going digital.
Omni-Channel Retail Trends
Consumers are becoming more buy-specific than price-specific. They are more focused on the product specifications, terms & conditions, value additions etc. Thus, these buyers are drifting from quality driven purchases to product blueprints. The backstories of a product and other particularisation steals the retail space. Customer retention and a global drive towards sustainability need a multichannel business model with devising legacy POS into a new average. The POS is not just a payment processing system in this era of digitization, but also a digital sales transit as it supports seamless customer maturity across digital and physical channels. The new POS practice has a lot more to offer for the benefit of customer retention and experience. It acts as a repository with a wide variety of customer data sorted on product preferences, purchase dynamics, loyalty information, price sensitive, and demographics in real-time. This accumulation of data helps the retailers to recover lost sales by offering customers access to the retailer’s entire display of inventory. Thus, the front-line POS executive is allowed to monitor the entire ordering and payment fulfilling processes, regardless of the channel the customers opt for to place their order and to procure it. The “Buy Online, Pickup Anywhere” holds good for unlearning the POS legacy. However, at the crux of such a system, a well-integrated POS and back-office systems are of utmost importance. The breakdown of different data silos, routing to a single synoptic management system that extends to a chain of stores, as well as to the web are an important part of the Omni-channel retailing model.
The Probable Capabilities for a Digital Transformation
The new POS system extends a personal touch when the customer is tracked through mobile phone positioning data while driving down to a supermarket. The personalised offers sent to the registered phone numbers according to the buyer’s preferences is an example of breaking the regular POS legacy, improvising on buyer preference, and customer contentment. However, though there has been much hype about digitization and technical opportunities, we are miles away from executing these consumer-oriented store concepts. The online accessibility of products and easy filtering as per our buying preference is different in a physical store. The online shopping and the reality of the POS is an uphill task. Since the significance of POS remains unchanged, retailers need to plan on how to sync the physical network of stores with their online environment, to offer customers an over-whelming and engaging shopping experience.
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