Having access to your customers’ details and purchase history means that you can treat them as individuals rather than trying to second guess each customer’s taste. It will also make each customer feel personally valued.

Easy to locate an existing customer

Building a sales history for each client should not be difficult if it’s all incorporated into the till as part of a sale. Simply put, as sold items are being scanned at the till you can link the overall transaction to a particular customer – from then on you know what styles they bought, what sizes and which colours; you know when they made their purchase and how much they spent. If you have a good stock management system then you will be able to see this information at both the till and use it to ‘speak’ to each customer individually by mail shot, email or text.

Like so many other system issues however there are some common pitfalls to watch out for. Initially these may be more obvious requirements such as the tills ease of use – it’s vitally important that customer’s details can be entered or looked up quickly and at any point in the transaction, not just at the beginning. Post code entry might help in this respect.

Full customer purchase history at the point of sale

Harder to check is the tills customer lookup speed. If you have a customer’s complete purchase history at your finger tips then shop staff can use this to point out items you know a customer will like, or that match with earlier purchases. While this data-lookup may be lightening fast during a demonstration you need to check that it will not slow down when you have hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of customers entered; who between them have hundreds of thousands of individual sales transactions.

Future growth considerations are also important here. At some future date you may want to run an approval facility to let a few select customers try-on items away from the shop, run your own customer accounts, create a loyally scheme or lay goods away for a client to collect later, and each of these brings its own subtle requirements. For example, if you do layaway goods for a client your system should allow you to track the deposit(s) and to separate the items held on layaway from your other stock. This last point is easily missed but vital, especially if you sell or transfer the items out of the shop where the client expects to collect them later.

Whether in the short, medium or long run, if you are really serious about building customer loyalty then you will at some stage need to run mail shots, email or text campaigns.  Check that this can be tied into a loyalty scheme and the extent to which these campaigns can be automatically targeted at your different client groups; for example, clients who spend a lot or clients who spend a little; web clients or shop clients; clients who have made a purchase this season or those that have not; clients whose birthday it is this month. The possibilities are endless and you may well want to have most of them covered, maybe not for immediate use, but for use at some future date.

Ultimately, having access to your customers purchase history can raise your footfall, raise your level of customer service and raise your company’s profitability. Take a look at Top to Toe and you will see how easy we make it to achieve these goals.

Customer Management Features

• Instant customer recall at till
• New customer creation at till
• Complete purchase history at point of sale
• Complete HQ tracking of all purchases
• HQ customer analysis by type of purchase
• Clever data filters
• Selective mail, email and text shots
• Loyalty schemes and customer accounts
• Goods on approval or deposit
• Birthday and anniversary promotions