Does your business look at its Point of Sale (POS) system as a simple digital cash register? In reality, it’s the centralized system that keeps your business running. When it works, it works, but when it doesn’t, your entire business could grind to a halt. These systems are much more complex than they used to be, so we want to help you adjust by addressing the five greatest challenges that your business will face with its modern POS system.
Shadow IT and Security In General
POS systems are more than just glorified cash registers; they are running AI-driven analytics that can predict inventory and personalize customer discounts. This increase in intelligence also poses a security challenge: Shadow AI. This is when employees use third-party apps or unauthorized AI tools that can leak sensitive customer data. It will take more than a firewall to prevent this from affecting your business. You’ll need to make sure that any AI your business uses is not training public AI models with your sensitive data.
Fragmentation and Integration Challenges
Too many businesses puzzle-piece together a system using POS for sales, a different platform for inventory tracking, and another for online. These platforms don’t speak well with each other and could lead to data fragmentation if you’re not careful. Trust us, better you find out now than when your business suffers from phantom inventory and you hear it from your customers. We recommend your POS and inventory management system be the same solution, or at least be connected by APIs that speak the same language.
Network Resiliency and Costs of Cloud-Only Solutions
While the cloud has allowed businesses to flourish, they ultimately depend on it, meaning cloud outages disproportionately impact cloud-only businesses. If your Internet goes down and you depend on the cloud for your POS system, you can’t take payments, and during peak business hours or seasons, this means serious amounts of lost profit. It can also result in loss of reputation and respect from your customers, which further eats into your bottom line.
We recommend you implement POS systems that can also process transactions from your smartphone, as well as one that can sync to the cloud when the connection is available. You should also have options for redundant failover Internet, like 5G backups, to make sure the system is always available and ready to go.
Compliance and PCI DSS
Compliance isn’t a one-and-done task; regulations have strict requirements for biometric data and tap-to-pay tokens, and many legacy POS systems simply don’t have what it takes to keep up with the latest encryption methods. Non-compliance can lead to serious fines that can break your budget, or worse. We can help you perform regular audits to make sure your hardware stays up to date and your staff aren’t writing down card numbers or manager codes.
Staff Friction
A POS system is useless if your team doesn’t know how to use it. When your POS system is cumbersome and difficult to train on, it should come as no surprise when your turnover rate increases. The fact remains that different sales environments call for different POS systems. A fast-paced environment shouldn’t be using a complex system, and when a system doesn’t work well for the task at hand, you can bet your team will find unapproved ways to make it work for them. You might experience inaccurate data that results in accidental discounts all because the POS is working against the task at hand. We’ll help you prioritize by eliminating options you don’t need or use, as well as by making the system easy to learn.
Eliminate Your POS Bottlenecks Today
If your technology is working against your business goals—or even if it’s simply not working with your goals—then you have a problem to address. Thankfully, you know the experts at Business Solutions & Software Group. We’ll help you eliminate ghost inventory, slow checkout speeds, and security anxieties so you can focus on what you do best: selling great products. Learn more today by calling us at (954) 575-3992.
Comments