Why Customer Engagement is So Important for Small Businesses

Without customers, any business will fail; but for the small business, loyal customers are their lifeblood. Marketing becomes a fulltime necessary evil until customer loyalty, which leads to repeat customers and customer referrals, can be established. Obtaining new customers is much more difficult and expensive than maintaining a repeating and loyal customer base through the use of customer engagement, which is easily accomplished when using a point of sale system.

Point of sale systems, such as Bepoz, enable a business to create loyal customers by utilizing customer engagement to its fullest. Point of sale systems also strengthen and solidify businesses’ relationships with its loyal customers.

In the ideal customer engagement system, loyal and potentially loyal customers should benefit the most. For a business to grow and maintain loyal customers, the business should work to acquire customers who are likely to become loyal repeat customers by focusing their marketing on potential customers who demonstrate the same traits as their current loyal customers.

Point of sale systems will do just that. POS systems reward customers for their loyalty. They also track each customer’s buying habits helping a business know what is working and what changes need to be made to increase those buying habits.

Point of Sale (POS) Systems Assist With Customer Engagement

POS systems assist with customer engagement by addressing the critical need for customer retention. A business with a 70% retention rate will lose two to three times as many customers over a five-year period as a business with a 90% retention rate. Towards this end, POS loyalty systems:

• Motivate a customer into becoming a repeat customer and a loyal customer through the accumulation of points or higher levels of service.
• Provide information about customers identifying their needs, easily and effectively so that they may be catered to if desired.
• Provide ways to motivate a customer through the redemption of rewards leading to increased enthusiasm and customer engagement.

All of this can be accomplished using a POS system.

How Do POS Systems Provide Engagement?

Each purchase the customer makes is tracked at the point of sale, providing the customer with earned points/rewards and providing the business with data and statistics that can be used to track trends and determine the best ways to engage the customer and others like them in the future.

Point of Sale Systems and Points/Rewards

POS systems can be used to provide points/rewards for dollars spent that can be redeemed. The promotion can be set up so that the points could be used the same as cash, as a promotional discount, as a way of awarding levels of rewards (more points means higher rewards are available), etc.

Point of Sale Systems and Product Promotions/Sales

Promotions or sales can be set up and monitored through the use of a POS system. One product or a group of products can be set for customers to purchase at a “rewards” price during a specified period of time. The promotional products and time intervals can be changed to encourage repeat business transactions over a long period of time.

This scenario could be further enhanced by adding a prize promotion into the package … a customer buys a certain amount of promotional products during a specified time period to receive the promotional “prize” product or reward. An example for this scenario: a golf course offers the twelfth round of golf free after eleven paid rounds. All of this is easily able to be tracked and implemented through a pos system.

In closing, a point of sale system  provides a business with a means to reward customer engagement. It also provides a methodology to easily track the customer’s engagement to find what works for both the business and their customer, creating a win-win scenario.