Regardless of which industry you’re in — grocery, retail, finance, entertainment — you know the customer experience matters. Customer experience isn’t just about the products you sell but about the services you offer as well. Ensuring a positive and pleasant experience in-store helps ensure customer loyalty and retention. It leads to higher sales and more revenue.
Unfortunately, a poor customer experience has the opposite effect: Your customers may walk away from interactions with your brand and your staff displeased. They might be determined never to return and to provide poor reviews online and offline.
While you may have already taken steps to improve the customer experience in store, such as by providing a unique experience and high-quality products, hosting events, rewarding loyalty, and even choosing the right music, there’s one factor that you might not have thought of but one that could have a big impact on the customer experience: cash handling.
You might be surprised to hear that after all your other efforts are put in place, your cash handling guidelines and procedures could be damaging your customer experience. The good news is you may turn things around.
Improving Speed
Whether you manage a clothing store, a grocery store, or a bank branch, you know time is of the essence for your customers and clients. They’re busy people, and they want to get in and out quickly — not stand around in line waiting to pay.
Improving your speed at the cash register does wonders for the customer experience. When people see those long lines moving quickly, they’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Often, transactions are slowed down due to manual cash processing. When employees are manually counting and sorting banknotes and coins and verifying the authenticity of bills, it’s going to take time. Investing in cash management technology, like the SuzoHapp SPS 700/800 Smart POS System or counterfeit detectors will speed things up. The technology does the cash handling automatically, so that customers move through their transactions more quickly.
Increasing Security
If customers don’t feel safe in your store, they likely won’t return. That’s why increasing cash handling security is so important. The right cash management technology, such as smart safes and counterfeit detectors, will enhance your security protocols. Reviewing and improving your cash handling guidelines will also help everyone in-store feel safer, such as only counting cash in the back room and reducing the amount of cash available in your cash drawers.
Removing Friction
Your employee was supposed to provide $10 in change but provided the customer only a $5 bill. Your employee tells a customer their banknote is counterfeit when indeed it isn’t. Your cashier gives a customer $20 in coins because they ran out of small bills to make change for a purchase.
Of course, the customer will not be happy with any of these scenarios. They expect their cash transactions to be completed without friction. Fortunately, cash management technology will help in all these situations. A Smart POS system will dispense accurate change for transactions. A counterfeit detector verifies bills with greater accuracy than the human eye. Cash management devices that integrate with cash management software will give you the insight you need to know exactly how much change you’re likely to need at any time of day, any time of the week, so you don’t run out of bills or coins when you need them most.
Your customer experience is directly related to your business success. Make sure your cash handling guidelines and procedures aren’t hindering your efforts to provide a pleasant and positive experience by investing in cash management technology.
