Time is money, and in today’s world of furniture retail it’s more important than ever to make the most of every moment.
Customer expectations are rising, competition’s increasing, and continued pressure on margins means that retailers can no longer rely on manual processes or disconnected systems.
Efficiency is key, and technology is needed that supports the admin side of the business, and actively improves the customer experience, too.
Two innovations leading this improvement, and helping independent furniture businesses compete against the online-only furniture outlets and multinationals are Swan’s Customer Ordering App (COA) and electronic shelf labels (ESLs). Here’s how.
Digitising the sales process with Swan’s Customer Ordering App
The customer journey to the point of purchase in furniture retail is a long and often winding one – which is to be expected, given it’s a major and expensive purchase.
Traditionally, however, that point of sale has involved a number of steps – checking stock, confirming product details, calculating pricing and manually processing orders.
Each step should be relatively straightforward, but when systems aren’t fully integrated you introduce potential delays or errors.
Swan’s COA removes these inefficiencies, with a real-time, connected interface that’s linked directly to the core retail system.
This enables:
- Live stock visibility across locations, ensuring staff can instantly confirm availability.
- Centralised product data access, including specification, pricing and configurations.
- Automated ordering processing, with transactions feeding directly into the system without rekeying.
As part of Swan’s Furniture Retail System suite of products, the COA is fully integrated with the rest of your store’s software, ensuring every order is placed immediately and reflected across stock availability and customer records, eliminating duplication and ensuring consistency across the business.
The impact of this is significant. Sales teams can move more quickly, customers receive accurate information and the risk of errors – for example, selling stock that’s not available, or getting pricing wrong – is significantly reduced.
And, in an age where consistency of experience is key, a customer will enjoy the same experience buying in one store compared to another, making it simpler for your team, and enhancing your brand image and reputation, too.
Real time pricing and accuracy with ESLs
While Swan’s COA transforms the process and experience when customers place an order, Electronic Shelf Labels (ESLs) help that process along by addressing another major operational challenge: pricing accuracy and consistency.
Pricing can change regularly: supplier prices may increase, special promotions mean prices fall for a period of time. In many retail environments, these price changes are still managed, in part at least, manually. This requires staff – often across multiple locations – to update labels accurately. Not only is it unnecessarily time consuming, but creates an opportunity for error, too.
ESLs eliminate this potential for error, while saving significant time, with a digitally connected pricing system. In short, prices are updated once in the system, and electronic shelf labels instantly display the new price.
ESLs integrate directly with Swan’s Furniture Retail System, enabling:
- Automated price updates linked to central pricing data
- Real-time synchronisation between system and shelf edge
- Elimination of manual label changes, reducing time spent and errors, too
By using ESLs, you’re ensuring the price displayed to the customer is always accurate, and consistent across the business – essential for both compliance and earning customer trust.
And, you’re capable of implementing new pricing strategies, flash sales, or new promotions quickly and effectively across multiple locations in an instant too, giving you greater control and flexibility over your sales strategies and margins.
Connecting technology to achieve greater efficiency
Individually, Swan’s COA and ESLs offer major operational benefits, however their true power is unlocked when they’re part of a fully integrated retail ecosystem.
Both tools connect directly into Swan Retail System, and contribute to a single flow of data and information across the business.
This creates:
- Greater accuracy, as all information is from one single source of truth
- Improved efficiency, as your team aren’t spending unnecessary time on tasks that can be automated
- Better visibility, with real time updates reflected across multiple systems
Creating a foundation for growth
Achieving operational efficiency isn’t about just saving time – it’s about creating a foundation to build and grow from, while enabling you to do more with less.
By digitising processes and improving accuracy, tools such as our COA and ESLs enable you to scale without increasing complexity. They allow teams to focus less on admin and more on delivering that customer experience that ensures people come back to you to buy – and tell their friends and acquaintances about, too.
And in a highly competitive market, in which expectations continue to rise, that balance between operational excellence and customer experience is what will define successful modern furniture retail.
Creating operational efficiencies is just one of the many challenges facing modern, independent furniture retailers today.
Download our ebook ‘9 Challenges Furniture Stores Face In A Digital-First World And How Forward-Thinking Retailers Are Solving Them’ today
