Every year, businesses big and small take the necessary precautions to combat flu season. This year, however, businesses will have to ramp up their efforts as Covid-19 concerns persist well into 2021. Simultaneously fighting traditional flu season on top of a global pandemic, retailers are looking for new and inventive ways to keep staff healthy and safe. However, adding new protocols can prove to be timely, and with social distancing orders in place, costly. Thankfully, there are several easy ways retailers can optimize their existing retail POS system to keep customers and staff safe without breaking the bank. Every year, businesses big and small take the necessary precautions to combat flu season.
This year, however, businesses will have to ramp up their efforts as Covid-19 concerns persist well into 2021. Simultaneously fighting traditional flu season on top of a global pandemic, retailers are looking for new and inventive ways to keep staff healthy and safe. However, adding new protocols can prove to be timely, and with social distancing orders in place, costly. Thankfully, there are several easy ways retailers can optimize their existing retail POS system to keep customers and staff safe without breaking the bank.
1. Encourage Employees to Avoid Contact with Customers
To reduce the spread of harmful pathogens, it’s crucial to minimize touchpoints between customers and employees as much as possible in your retail store. To tackle this issue, many retailers have utilized directional floor stickers and signs to control traffic flow as well as clear plastic barriers in instances where customers need to be face-to-face with staff.
While these methods are helpful, the best way to minimize the spread of germs is by eliminating contact at the checkout. Sure, clear plastic sheets can act as barriers between customers and staff, but they offer no protection against passing payment cards or cashback and forth. With the Auto-Star retail POS system, you can offer a variety of contactless payment options, including self-service kiosks.
With the right hardware and software, retailers can also minimize contact with interactive price/loyalty checking kiosks. Customers can easily lookup product and price information, view products on promotion, and check loyalty points. In addition to providing a contactless checkout experience, Auto-Star’s top-of-the-line retail point of sale system increases checkout speed with real-time transaction processing and features flexible payment options, including debit, credit, EBT, FSA, gift cards, and more.
2. Keep Management in One Place
Communication and safety go hand in hand. A great way to protect your employees is by knowing how to drive clear messages from management. As a retailer, you should utilize your Point of Sale and Chain Store Management System to establish and deliver coherent messages throughout your retail store. By doing this, you can efficiently deliver one message from one place to all of your stores and employees. Regular messages can be utilized to communicate best safety practices, new company policies, or information on the latest sales and promotional content.
By managing communication from one location, your management team can minimize contact with customers. Using this method, management can carry out their duties from their separated offices. Duties such as creating and managing products and pricing, and centralizing store promotions can all be performed. Retailers can also stay informed and receive important information without having to be in-store with email reports and online reporting through WebPoint.
Your Chain Store Management System can also be used to manage employee shifts, limiting the number of employees in the store at any given time. You can even process data in real-time; Star-Link seamlessly communicates critical updates with the Star-Plus point of sale used at individual locations. View up to the minute transactions, sales, inventory, and promotion information to ensure consistency throughout your retail store. This information can be used to make smarter, more precise decisions that can work to limit redundant employee tasks
3. Control Traffic on the Floor and Behind the Scenes
One of the most significant issues for employees is staying socially distanced during the day. There are many ways your retail POS technology can help organize and limit the number of staff on the floor at a given time in order to minimize the risk of virus spread. Above, we mentioned how data analytics can be leveraged to make smarter, more precise business decisions to keep employees from performing unnecessary activities. However, there is more data analytics can do.
Real-time data can be leveraged to collect knowledge about how consumers move through stores. This information can support inventory movement. In fact, Auto-Star’s retail POS system streamlines inventory management. With it, employees can ensure the right products are stocked at the right time, with suggested product ordering. They can then track inventory on hand in real-time, manage orders, and calculate purchase orders. All of this can be used and monitored from the retail POS, eliminating the need for manual monitoring from employees. This also means employees only have to go out and stock shelves when needed, limiting their interaction with others.
Real-time data from your retail POS can also be used to map out employee routes around the storefront in order to limit face-to-face interaction. To further limit in-store traffic, retailers can promote their eCommerce store or invest in other advanced technologies. Take Kroger for example it announced that it would be using QueVision technology to limit in-store traffic by 50%. Instead of relying on employees to manually count customers entering and exiting the building, technologies like QueVision will automatically track in-store capacity and speed up checkout lines.
Needless to say, the world of retail has changed dramatically in the past year and the struggle to stay in business while also keeping employees safe has proved to be a challenging one. However, there are several ways your established retail POS system can help keep your employees and customers healthy when utilized to its fullest potential. If your POS system isn’t keeping up with your company’s needs, it may be time to consider switching. Contact Auto-Star today to transform your retail store operations; our expert support team is standing by.
