A good quality Point of Sale system is essential for any retail business. However, you may be shocked to find that most businesses aren’t getting full use out of them. Beyond understanding the basics of operating your POS system, there are actually ways to help your staff get the most out of them and to improve their sales performance. To help bring you up to speed, here’s how you can better use your POS systems to manage and improve your retail staff’s performance.
Offer training
Even if a new staff member has experience with a previous POS system, there’s nothing to guarantee they will know how to use your one correctly. Instead, whenever someone joins, always offer one-on-one training to make sure they can use it effectively. If you think that current staff are lacking in their knowledge, then there’s nothing wrong with going back to basics and testing their ability to use all the features. When used properly, a POS system should help your staff in their role, rather than hinder them.
Personalised logins for payroll
When busy shopping periods come around, it’s often hard to keep up with payroll and staffing hours. In this case, make sure all staff have their own personal logins. Then, when it comes to sorting out payroll, you can easily cross check timesheets with the exact hours worked. whether or not the staff were actually working those exact hours.
Track performance
Personalised logins are also crucial because they allow you to specifically track the performance of each staff member. You can see who is performing best and use your POS to calculate commissions, or offer rewards and incentives based on performance.
Better manage resources
The data on who sells what and when is also useful in allowing you to identify specific trends, for instance busy and quiet periods, even by department and times of day. You can then see whether you are losing out on sales by not having enough staff or overspending on staff who aren’t busy enough. If there are not enough staff, or too many, then this can be frustrating and demotivating for everyone working.
Staff accountability
Make sure every staff member is aware that everything they perform on the POS is tracked back to their identity. This helps make every individual accountable for timekeeping, as well as honesty. Often awareness is all that is required to increase accuracy, reduce errors or shortfalls in cashing up, and improve punctuality.
Share the results
When you are lucky enough to have staff who are performing well, then reward them. Another useful exercise is to regularly print off and discuss results with the entire team. When employees can see how they are performing alongside their colleagues, it can help motivate them to work harder and achieve more sales.
Here at ECR, we know the importance of a great POS system and understand how integral they are to your company’s success. That’s why we supply a number of POS solutions, each tailored to fit the needs of different retail environments. If you would like to discuss upgrading your POS to one that can be used to better boost staff performance, get in contact today.
