COMBATING THE INTERNET SHOPPER
"... there is one thing that I will tell you that you absolutely cannot do without . That is a system to track your customers and their purchases ..."
" It can serve as a data well that allows you to divvy and parse it to focus on specific groups of customers for special offers ."
Photo : @ iStock . com / grinvalds say , and apparently we were all misbehaving quite badly .
If you are going to try to build yourself a shop like this , there is one thing that I will tell you that you absolutely cannot do without . That is a system to track your customers and their purchases . This is different than the charts you are obligated to keep as a practicing pedorthist , I am talking something geared purely to retail . This is the lifeblood of your operation . It tells your customer that you hope to see them back , because you are writing down their name to keep as part of your store . It saves your salespeople valuable time by serving as a place to write notes about what worked , what didn ’ t and why . It garners additional sales by allowing your staff to offer to get the customer another pair of the shoes they just declared as their all-time favorite without having to guess at the model or size . It can serve as a data well that allows you to divvy and parse it to focus on specific groups of customers for special offers . Trends in sales can be identified by interfacing this system with a point of purchase system ( they are often one in the same nowadays . Anything that serves this function is better than nothing . The first store I ever worked in used 3x5 cards . The upside — aside from a few of my colleagues who apparently wrote with a palsy that wasn ’ t evident elsewhere or let their pet ant wander aimlessly about the card with dirty feet , there were no issues with this not being able to “ talk ” to other systems . They were cards . You can only read them . The downside — not super easy to use as a tool to identify trends or to market to particular groups . Thankfully , computer based systems have become the norm and are readily available . Even just a carefully constructed Excel spreadsheet could be made to function reasonably well if you had to do this on a shoestring ( sorry , I couldn ’ t help myself ). And , mine became my first line of defense against the Internet Shopper . This is how it works :
Mr . Pinchapenny comes in and runs my brave salesgirl all over the store trying on various shoes and inserts to make his hammertoes feel better . Fourty-five minutes later he declares that he is now standing in the single best feeling pair
Current Pedorthics March / April 2017 37