The term Point of Sale often refers in connection with or relative to the hardware and software for retail store checkouts. An electronic Opencart POS system streamlines retail operations by automating the transaction process and syncing important sales data with the online store.

In this article, we will discuss how a retail outlet can manage its customers and build a strong relationship with them using the Opencart POS system.

As we know that customers are the key to every business and customer management could be a very difficult task. But with the help of the Opencart POS system, you can easily manage and keep a track of your customers.

An Opencart POS system could have any number of features to simplify and boost up the process of customer management and it would totally depend on your business requirements.

Here, we will be discussing some of the key features that a Retail Opencart POS system should have for Customer Management.

The very basic and standard feature is to be able to collect and store the customer details, such as their name, contact information, purchase history, birthday, etc.

Creating unique Customer IDs for each and every customer could be really beneficial as IDs can be easily in use to identify and store customer details in the system.

Using these IDs, the salesperson or the cashier can instantly search up the customer profile and can add current purchases to it. So Customer IDs can be helpful in easily identifying customers. Now few questions arise:

• How do we collect customer information?
• Why do we need to store customer information?
• What exact information need to collect?
• How will this information be beneficial to the retail store owner?

So now let’s answer these questions:

Whenever a customer comes to the checkout counter, the cashier can ask for his Customer ID or name, if the customer profile is not saved in the database then the cashier can easily create the Customer Profile.

Or add a new customer by asking the basic details like name, contact information and birthday, etc.

The answer to this question is really very simple we need to store customer information to keep track of his purchase history and use that in various marketing and sales strategies.

Having customer information allows you to identify your loyal or regular customers and based on this you can give them a personised experience by giving them some discounts or rewards.

Information like the customer’s full name, contact number, email id, birthday, purchase history, customer feedback, etc. can be collected and saved in the customer profile.

The above information such as the customer’s name is useful to make a personal connection with the customer by calling them by their name without having to them about it.

The salesperson can look up the customer id and all the customer details will be visible to him. Contact number and email id can be used for sending promotional offers, discounts, new arrivals or any other marketing message.

The customer’s birthday can be used to provide him with some special offer and strengthen the customer relationship.

Purchase history can be used to identify the customer purchase behaviour and top purchased items and this information can be used in various marketing ways.

Now let’s say you have collected and made customer profiles and you are using this information to boost your sales. But what if you have many outlets around the city or country?

So for this, you need to have a Cloud-based Central Customer Management which allows you to keep one customer list for all your outlets. This way all the customer data will be synchronized in all your outlets.

So till now we have successfully collected our customer information and synchronized that information with all our outlets, but what now?

Now we have to learn how to use that information for our benefit and also to build a strong relationship with the customer.

Creating customer groups based on their purchase behaviour can help in targeted promotions.

You can create a group for regular customers and can provide them regular discounts from time to time to boost them up to go for more and more purchases.

Similarly, you can create a VIP group for your high-end customers. There could be endless ways in which you can categorize your customers so it totally depends on you how many groups you create.

Keep track of what customer is purchasing on regular basis. For example, let’s say that John visits your retail shop at the end of every month to purchase basic household things such as toiletries, vitamins, cereals etc.

Now one month he didn’t come to visit your shop and the same happened for the next month also.

So in this case what you can do is send John some targeted promotional messages to remind him that you care for your customers. Also, you can give him some discounts as well.

Attract new customers and increase revenue with the help of gift cards. Giving Gift cards to customers constantly reminds them to come and visit your store again.

These cards can be gifted to friends and families and they can use the credit amount assigned to that gift card.

You can provide your cards to your customers and these can will contain all customer details just swiping these cards cashier will get to know about the customer.

These can hold the reward points and can be useful to hold the refund amount if the customer chooses to make a refund for any purchase.

These cards can make payments using the amount present in them in the form of refunds or reward/loyalty points.

Even you can allow your customer to recharge these cards and then use them for making payments. You can also give some discounts for making payments using your cards.

Rewarding your customers with some discounts or offers will surely make them come back to your store again. You can assign rewards on some product purchases or on purchasing over some set amount.

You can also give loyalty points to your regular customers.

Providing customers with various ways for making payments can be highly beneficial. You can allow your customers to pay using cash, store (credit) cards, bank debit/credit cards, rewards points, etc.

Allowing easy returns to your customers will encourage them to go for a purchase without any hesitation. For example, John purchased 2 packs of cereal boxes, one chocolate flavour and another normal one.

Later on, reaching home he discovers that he purchased the wrong flavoured cereal. So he decides to go back to the store and return and exchange the mistakenly bought product.

On reaching the store, he remembers that he forgot the receipt at home only. So now what? Should he back to his home to bring the receipt or call someone to bring him the receipt?

All this could be so hectic. So what the retail stores can do is pull up John’s purchase history, as we already discussed about keeping track of customer purchase history, and simply just re-print the receipt.

Simple the problem is no more! This can be really useful when a customer forgets or loses the receipt and wants to return some item.

Also, in case of refunds, the amount should credit back to store cards so that customers can use them for their next purchase.

Hiding customers’ private information and maintaining customer privacy should be the first priority for any retail store.

Customer’s private information such as contact information, address, etc. should be secure from the person at the counter i.e. the cashier or any other sales representative.

Only people with authorization should view and give permission to access customers’ private information.

Asking customers for their valuable feedback can be really useful in enhancing and uplifting the services.

So you can ask your customers to give feedback by filling out the standard feedback form or asking them to give ratings and feedback using the website or mobile app.

Using these features, the retail outlet can differentiate itself from its competitors by building a strong relationship with customers which would result in customer retention and customer engagement.

This, in turn, will help in winning over the trust of the customers and hence generating more revenue for the outlet.