Point-Of-Sale Technology Heads Back To The Future

By Mark Shutt, Principal and Chuck Winter, Technology Leader at North Highland

Customer experience is constantly being redefined. It is informed by technology, customer data, popular trends and fads, among other factors. Unfortunately, all too often a customer’s experience is defined by how the business wants them to engage within their store and does not match the consumer’s preferences. This is most evident in point-of-sale (POS) interactions.Screenshot 2017 05 23 11.27.43
To understand today’s POS ecosystem we need to understand how retailers managed purchasing interactions in the past. The original cash register was a cigar box with the sole function of holding cash (and hopefully keeping it dry). Over the decades there were various iterations of this simple concept with the main innovation being the addition of functionality to add up numbers to track each sale and calculate any change to be tendered. Fast forward to the 1980s and additional features were added including credit card systems, price look up, inventory counts, coupon printers and customer loyalty programs. As we forge ahead into 2017, a decomposing of multi-purpose POS technology to support omni-channel commerce is taking place with some capabilities of this shift reflected in a return to the simple sales transaction functions found at the register of yesteryear. For customers, this holds the potential to encourage easier commerce exchange and for the retailer, complexity into the technology needed to create an improved customer experience.

https://pointofsale.com/On-Managing/Point-of-Sale-Technology-Heads-Back-to-the-Future.html