For retailers, the holidays are something to look forward to with a mix of joy and dread (but hopefully more of the former than the latter). Joy because of all the sales and revenue (yay!), dread because they’re going working even harder than usual – with extended holiday shopping hours, training temporary staff, monitoring and ordering popular stock, and heaps more. It may be an understatement to say this time of year can be quite stressful for store owners.
Which is why we’ve compiled a simple and handy list of tips for keeping your clients sane and stress free during the holidays.
Get in touch
Call your clients and let them know you’re available to help, making sure you’re specific about what services you offer to help make their lives easier. This is a small but very important gesture, which will delight your clients and reinforce your business relationship.
Make it regular
Once you’ve gotten in touch, start making that line of communication a regular thing. Set up a schedule of calls to touch base with your clients every so often, scaling the number of calls to suit their and your needs and comfort level (let’s face it, no one wants to be spammed with phone calls).
Be available
Keep your phone on and nearby. If your client has a serious issue, they’ll love you to bits for answering on the second ring. That kind of commitment does not go unnoticed (or unrewarded) – with favourable word of mouth and recommendations about your awesome customer service.
Provide additional services
The holidays require all sorts of additional resources. Help your clients easily tackle roadblocks by offering additional services. Some of what you can offer:
- Temporary staff training. Help your clients get their temporary holiday staff up to speed.
- iPad and barcode scanner rentals. Stock control can become a real issue throughout the holidays. Follow them up with easy stocktake tools that your clients can rent and return.
Brush up on your add-ons
Vend has some really great add-ons that save you and your clients heaps of time. A few of these in particular are great for the busy season.
- Customer self check-out apps are particularly useful during the holiday rush. Check out ShoppinPal and SelfPay.
- Staff rostering can be a real chore. Managing temporary staff plus holiday hours and leave time can get messy quickly. WhenIWork offers cloud staff rostering and a widget in the Vend dashboard for easy schedule monitoring.
- Stitchlabs makes it easy for your clients to sell more via other channels like Etsy and Ebay, without increasing their workload.
- Clients can optimise holiday displays and sales by measuring foot traffic and dwell time with Swarm.
About Tara Benedict
A former retailer (and unabashed nerd) who daydreamed about integrated POS software, Tara now delightedly recruits, promotes, and enables Vend's wonderful channel of add-ons and partners. An ardent sharer of Vend news and events, connect with Tara on Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ and never miss an opportunity to meet up with the affable Vend team.
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