Given that nearly half of all business owners have never taken a business course, it’s not surprising that so many businesses fail in the first five years. However, if you’re working with a POS system, you’ve got POS data to offer you valuable insights that could help you run your business better. If you take the time to look at the stats and analyze them, you could end up succeeding from day one.
Here’s how POS insights can boost your business beyond your competitors.
Keep Track of Inventory
When a customer arrives and orders something only to find out that you’ve run out of inventory, this is no small inconvenience. If the customer knows of a competitor they could go to right down the street, you’ve just lost a sale.
Getting a customer into your establishment is hard enough. Here, you’ve done all of the work to get someone into your place only to sell them on something that you’ve run out of. It’s hard to get a repeat customer from this experience.
It’s a more or less obvious data point, but your POS should influence your ordering. It may not be a perfect system, but you can track stock counts, take items off the menu when your inventory runs out, and know what you could put on special.
Whether purchases are made online or inside your brick and mortar shop, the numbers can be integrated.
Extra inventory is also bad for your business. They take up extra space that could be filled with things that actually sell. Built-in inventory management allows you to keep an eye on things before they become an issue.
You can offer the best customer service when you know what you have. Control over your inventory via your POS keeps customers coming back.
Make Customer Profiles
When your customers make purchases, they offer lots of valuable information. You can often get names, phone numbers, and past purchases. This is especially prescient if you handle online ordering.
If you have a loyalty program, you can make good use of this information in an incentivized way. Tell your customers that you’ll offer them free products or discounts on a regular basis, and they’ll be happy to fork over an email address or phone number.
Your POS system can store all of this data and help you make use of it easily. You can send out marketing campaigns, SMS discounts, and product recommendations. Based on their previous purchases and orders, you can also start to generate bigger sets of data.
Start coming up with clever ways to pair up products and increase your sales by seeing which products get ordered together the most.
Make Use of Your Best Staff
Your POS system requires every employee to sign in and ring sales under their own name or account. This is information that allows for accountability and makes it easier to organize the floor of your establishment. It also offers insight valuable to business owners.
Restaurant owners can see who is the best at upselling or getting a table to order one more round. They can be clutch players during slower parts of the week. You can also see who is turning around the highest number of orders and get them in during your busiest times to make sure customers always have space.
With unique accounts, you also see the productivity of each employee. You can create reward and incentive programs to get other employees to hit similar goals. You can also be sure to reward those most productive employees to keep them loyal and working hard.
Find ways for everyone to upgrade their skills while you track this data. Take a positive approach to the numbers you see, even if they’re not as high as you’d like them to be.
Watch Sales Trends
While you might have some general idea of how well your products are moving and how fast things are selling, your POS has the most solid data. A POS is there to make sales and show you all of the most intimate data about your business.
Menus can be customized to get even more granular as you need them to be. While it might be fine for some restaurants to have a button for coffee, others might want to have a separate button for a medium coffee or even one with soy milk.
If you suspect that people are ordering more of one product, you can see whether or not that’s true. If you don’t see it in the numbers but the product isn’t in stock, you can start narrowing down what might be happening. You might find you need to add more options to your POS.
Sales reports aren’t just a simple barometer for how well your business is doing. They can help you plan for the future. You can look at times of day, days of the week, months, and even seasons.
Look for trends, peaks, and valleys in your sales numbers as they’ll hold a lot of valuable information. Understanding what’s contributing to those trends doesn’t have to be a mystery either. The information could be right there in the data.
You could be optimizing your hours of operation, your scheduling, or how you serve your customers.
POS Data Holds Valuable Information
The POS data that you get from your POS system can offer you more information than any business course could. You’ll see concrete data that reflects the health of your business. You’ll also be able to project into the next year and make moves to ensure that your business succeeds.
To learn more about how POS helps your inventory, check out our coverage.
