How to beat the big box retailers at customer service

With the holiday shopping season underway, small businesses are looking for ways to compete with big box retailers. It may not be easy to keep pace on price, but there are ways to differentiate the shopping experience for your customers using smart mobile payment technology – and it can be done with minimal investment.

How it works – by downloading our smart payments software app to your personal smart phone and using an inexpensive Bluetooth-enabled card reader, you can accept digital wallets, credit cards, and debit cards from anywhere in your store. The payments software also syncs with your website and social media to enable flexible purchase and pickup options.

When small businesses embrace mobile payment acceptance technology, there are massive benefits for employees and customers:

1. Eliminate checkout wait times to bolster convenience.

From long checkout lines to self-checkout woes, consumers are frustrated with the impersonal and highly transactional nature of shopping at large chains. Using synced, mobile point-of-sale devices, your sales team can take payments anywhere in the store the minute the customer is ready to check out. No lines form and the customer experience transforms from business-oriented to personal.

2. Foster a culture of service.

Bringing the checkout experience out from behind the counter using smart, mobile point-of-sale technology will also encourage your employees to engage in a culture of customer service. Retail employees want flexibility, growth opportunities, and engaging interactions on the job – which they likely are not going to find stuck behind a cash register in a traditional retail ecosystem. Instead, mobile point-of-sale technology allows employees to mingle with customers anywhere in the store, answer questions quickly using catalog lookup from their mobile device and upsell products in the moment.

3. Offer flexible purchase and pickup options.

Holiday shoppers expect small businesses to offer the same conveniences that big box retailers provide to reduce effort and save time, such as curbside pickup, promo codes, gift cards and ordering ahead online. In fact, research from Salesforce shows that offering “buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS)” increases sales both online and in-store – they predict $28 billion in incremental global sales related to BOPIS alone this holiday season. Further, customers picking up online orders increasingly expect to receive their purchases at curbside, without ever entering the store. These conveniences are easy to execute with smart, mobile point-of-sale technology.

It’s not easy for small businesses to compete with big box retailers on price but removing the physical barrier at checkout – in-store, online, and curbside – is key to beating them at customer service.