We are here with a post that can be a saviour for retailers. We have brought 5 retailing software tools that most people are not aware of and need to opt for to manage their business activities.
Retailing is a complex activity where a lot of efforts are to be made to manage every task with efficiency. The retail activities include managing the raw stock, products, payments, inventory, contacts, customers, and much more. It also becomes essential to manage market trends and opt for products accordingly.
To stay competitive in the market, one has to follow customer preferences and decide the availability of the product accordingly. If you own software, think about bringing on board a developer advocate to assist in promoting and marketing your software product. Here are some feature of retailing software which you must consider in 2020.
Let's have a look at the retail software tools that you might not be aware of.
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Accounting Software
The accounting software is an important technology-driven version of a traditional sales ledger. The software helps the retailers track incoming and outgoing monetary transactions and is capable of generating historical reports of financial activities.
The major features of the accounting tool include accounts receivable, accounts payable, general ledger, financial reporting, and financial management. A few of the best accounting software also comes with more advanced features, such as payroll services, reporting, and analytics.
The payroll services include activities such as managing the payroll for employees, generating paychecks based on attendance and leaves, and also deducting the necessary taxes automatically. The software also helps to monitor sales and determine product margins and markups to calculate the activities.
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Customer Relationship Management Software
CRM software, also known as customer relationship management software, is a useful tool that helps retailers manage their customer interactions. The traditional methods are used to maintain in-person interactions to stay updated with customer choices, but with modern software, retailers can easily use different platforms such as emails, messages, social media accounts, phone calls, messenger services, and much more. The CRM software tool helps retailers outreach customers and streamline all communications and relations.
CRM software provides benefits such as tracking interactions, managing contacts, managing leads, storing documents and data, managing calendar dates, and much more. The major advanced features for the retailers are:
Managing the customer data by designing a searchable database of the customer data and their purchase history to have easy cross-selling, reference, and upselling The software can automate messages or emails to provide customers with a personalised experience and respect their preferences. The software also collects and stores the demographic data to the customer profiles so that the retailer can group similar customers into different groups.
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E-commerce Software
E-commerce software is one more tool that helps retailers set the digital front of their stores and manage online sales. Apart from this, the tool also helps users with shipping activities and enables tracking of product and stock listings.
This tool provides benefits such as product development, website design, sales reporting, online payment, and much more. A few of the advanced features for the retail industry include:
The online shopping cart enables customers to fill the cart with products they like while browsing the online store. The software also allows estimating the shipping time as well as the handling and packing costs for products and includes them in billing. Integration with third-party platforms for shipping and delivery also becomes easy. Selling on multiple marketplaces becomes easy through integrations with third-party platforms such as Amazon, Flipkart, Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, and much more.
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Field Service Management Software
The FMS software manages the delivery of products to the desired customers for the retailer’s business. The software makes it easy to coordinate the mobile workforce of delivery agents and make sure that they don’t waste much time searching for the customer’s address. The FMS software includes major features such as work order management, dispatching, collection of payments, mobile access, and much more. The special features for retail users include:
Dispatching the courier driver to the customer’s address. Planning a custom route for the delivery agent to manage multiple deliveries in a single locality. Manage the partners and create profiles for all the delivery agents to manage the interactions between them and make every communication easy.
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Customer Support Software
Last but not least, Customer Support Services software is used to provide in-person help desk software digitally to customers to automate the redundant task of responding to FAQs. This tool helps retailers address customer complaints more effectively with less human effort and requirements.
The majority of customer support software offers features such as support ticket responses, a knowledge base, issue tracking, and escalations. A few of the exceptional features for the retailers include:
The software helps to create a centralised knowledge base of some frequently asked questions and frequently faced queries. This helps to save time spent on repeated solutions to such queries by the manual human staff and allows them to explore the knowledge before reaching any calling agent. The software also helps to track the journey of any complaint or issue, right from the beginning until it is resolved. Also, the software allows the users to create predefined replies for a few questions or different scenarios and automate the task of filling in details such as ticket ID and estimated solution time.
Conclusion
These are five retailing software tools that help retailers achieve benefits with minimum expenses and the best efficiency. The use of advanced software not only reduces the efforts, time, and budget of activities but also helps to manage every business task effectively, along with customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction.
Apart from these 5 types of software tools, there are many more out there, such as inventory management software, POS software, retail ERP software, marketing automation software, and many more. It becomes important to select the tools as per the requirements of the business unit and the total budget to meet the requirements.
