When management and employees work together to attain the common goal of growing a business, everyone wins. Customers receive top-notch service from motivated associates. Workers feel understood because they are treated as equal members of a team. Managers can continue to run and expand their successful businesses. By facilitating the streamlining of important internal functions, a smart terminal can enhance the employee experience, with the benefits spreading throughout the entire operation.
What is a smart terminal?
A smart payment terminal takes the capabilities of a standard processing machine several great leaps forward. Whereas old-school equipment only processed customer payments, modern smart terminals are multi-talented. In addition to reading customers’ credit cards and sending the information on to the other players in the payments process, smart terminals can integrate with software and systems to do the following:
• Inventory management, including tracking products from the moment of delivery until they are sold.
• Customer relationship management. The software in your point of sale system should allow you to create and maintain a customer database. Whenever a purchase is made, it can be credited to the specific customer, making it possible for you to keep logs of shoppers’ buying histories. With these details at your disposal, you can customize emails and send targeted discounts that make customers feel special and keep them coming back.
• Integration with other software and systems. Say goodbye to those tedious spreadsheets and drawers overflowing with receipts. A smart POS system can work seamlessly with your accounting and database programs to ensure that transactions are correctly recorded in real time. As a result, bookkeeping is exponentially easier, particularly when tax time rolls around.
• Report generation. With just a few clicks, smart terminals can deliver actionable reports that you can leverage to learn about profits and losses, check productivity, gauge the success of particular marketing campaigns — even predict extended forecasts that allow you to make intelligent financial decisions!
If this was all that your smart payment terminal could do for you, it would still be an amazing silent partner for your company. However, the employee management tools it offers are the pièce de résistance.
How your smart terminal can enhance your employee management strategies.
There is no doubt that employees are happier and more productive when they are given the right type of environment to work in. This cannot happen without clear and fair policies, a degree of flexibility, and constructive support from management when conflicts or concerns arise. In other words, successful collaboration among management and associates cannot happen without the human touch.
That being said, automated systems such as your smart terminal can play a vital supplementary role. Here are just a few of the ways this can happen.
1. Create error-free schedules.
How many hours have you spent poring over your list of employees in an attempt to match workers with empty time slots? Have you ever thrown up your hands in surrender when the message about a scheduling change somehow never makes it to the affected employees?
With your smart terminal at your side, issues like these can be minimized or even eliminated altogether. That’s because smart payment systems can generate weekly schedules that are sent at a prescribed time to all staff, ensuring that everyone has access to the information in a timely fashion. Since your system is cloud-based, you can even accept last-minute time-off requests and schedule changes. Furthermore, each employee can be responsible for keeping track of their own paid holidays and sick time, removing that particular albatross from your shoulders once and for all.
Another important element of employee management is the ability to track who has clocked in and out and when. By automating these activities via a smart terminal, you can replace the honor system with a reliable mechanism that you can tap to generate helpful employee productivity reports.
If your business involves accepting tips, you can also set your system to require that employees declare their gratuities before they are allowed to clock out for the day. Finally, the system can even keep track of what workers are owed in their various roles. This is especially helpful if their pay scale differs from one role to the next.
2. Generate employee performance reports.
You cannot be everywhere at once, a fact that makes it difficult to keep track of how each of your workers is performing on a daily basis. However, your smart terminal has you covered in this regard as well. Because it is connected to your product catalog, it can show you how well each specific worker is doing at any given time.
The capabilities don’t stop there. You can tweak the data to learn which worker is excelling at selling a particular product line. Furthermore, you can gauge what a worker’s most productive day or time of day is. Armed with this information, you can reward employees who are succeeding while providing additional training to those who are struggling.
3. Gain better security with employee access controls.
Your systems store important digital information that should not be readily accessible to all workers. For instance, a new associate has no need to view your back-office functions, however, an assistant manager may. With the help of your smart terminal, you can assign different security levels to employees based on their roles and “need to know.” Taking this precaution can protect you against both intentional insider sabotage and mistakes made out of carelessness.
4. Provide a more challenging and exciting work experience.
When the more tedious tasks are handed over to your automated systems, your valued workers are freed up to do more of what they like. Instead of requiring someone to be tethered to the checkout counter for an entire shift, you can use the mobile capabilities of your smart payment terminal to take your associates directly to your customers. They can then answer questions, upsell supplementary items, and even complete purchases from anywhere in the store, at curbside, or from anywhere else your customers are.
Your smart payment terminal is brimming with employee management tools that can enhance productivity, increase morale, and take your worker and customer experiences to the next level. With the help of this vital automated assistant, you can dedicate your time to giving your staff and customers the unique personal touch they deserve. Combine these cutting-edge tools with the products and services that make your business stand out, and you are sure to leave your rivals in the dust.
