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Vietnamese Point of Sale (POS) is going through rapid change driven by emerging technology trends and innovations. In the last post, we discussed the explosion of hardware and software innovation and its impacts on this evolution. In this post, we will introduce one more critical part and its impact in POS innovation.
A new set of drivers as catalyst for POS transformation
As the growth of POS has evolved in a totally new direction, it has been impacted by a new ecosystem:
- Smartphone proliferation and capabilities
Smartphones are now considered a standard device for most people. Such convenience devices provide users with extremely quick and easy access to product information, price comparisons, social network reviews, and the ability to interact with products and merchant systems.
Understanding that trend, retailers are encouraged to not only enhance customer interaction throughout the shopping funnel but also strengthen in-store mobile engagement. As a result, they can drive foot traffic into retail locations as well as create effective countering to online competitors.
- Sensors
The acceleration of embedded sensors in mobile-connected devices has brought the opportunity to improve customer engagement. These sensors, with the ability of delivering new data streams that can be leveraged in many unique ways, help merchants get better customer insights and analysis.
- Developers and startups
Startup and app developers are now breaking into the POS space to build unique and appealing POS experiences through apps so that they can be integrated with back-end systems.
POS evolution uniquely enhances personalised customer experience
With all the factors above, POS transformation is foreseen to effectively impact both online and in-store customer experience, including:
- Understanding customer reactions with in-store products
- Empowering sales associates with individual customer profile data
- Engaging with customers throughout the store floor and shopping process
- Delighting consumers with persuasive loyalty reward programs
- Speeding up the shopping process by providing self-checkout and payments at locations other than fixed registers
- Implementing new authentication system for customer to get easy access to account such as visual identification, voice recognition, and biometrics
With such POS-enabled capabilities, merchants will have the necessary information and tools to help them control and develop their marketing and customer service strategies in a most unique and effective way.
This is the end of our series about The evolution of POS in the new era. You can download our full whitepaper “The Future of POS: Point of Sale Evolution and Its Impacts” to find out more here.
