Spending more time with customers might mean less time for employees to meet internally. By relying on inter-office communication, you’re able to reduce the frequency of meetings, while still keeping employees informed on company information and procedural changes. You can communicate with one employee, a group of employees, or everyone in your company. This can be especially helpful for managers who work opposite shifts. Automatic email notifications can also alert employees of price updates, Accounts Payable for refund checks, follow-up call results, and when special order items have arrived so you can contact your customers for pickup.

During busy season, timely communication between office staff, the sales team, and service technicians can be challenging. To combat this, you can easily track customer calls using your pool and spa service software’s follow-up feature. For example, if a call comes in for an employee who is out in the field — you can easily forward the message with the customer’s name and phone number automatically populated. The recipient has the option to complete the call or transfer it to another employee. At the touch of a button, you can create a follow-up call in the sale, sales order, or customer screens.

By creating a follow-up call in the sale, sales order, or customer screens, this allows the message to quickly be forwarded to an employee. Follow-up calls allow you to:

• Ensure that customers and prospects aren’t neglected.
• Create calls from inside the receiving screen to call the customer when merchandise arrives.
• Send a follow-up to the service department when parts needed for a service call have arrived.
• Schedule follow-up calls for new sales leads, special orders, problems, or any other important information.

Flag messages allow staff members to communicate information about the customer to co-workers, to ensure no customers are missed. This includes informing them of customers with outstanding balances, available in-store credit, open quotes, and open transactions. You can also attach pictures and files to specific customers and organize all of the customers’ unique equipment data and serial numbers in one place.

The “Wish List” is an effective communication tool that enables staff to contribute ideas to inventory purchases based on what they see is low stock.

Ideally, your entire staff should “hold their own” on the sales floor, especially when it comes to effectively up-selling and cross-selling products and services during the busy summer season. To set them up for success, though, it’s important to provide tools that ensure they can effectively communicate with customers about all possible “up-sell” products, rather than rely solely on you providing direct communication to employees about the “up-sell” products.

RB Retail and Service software has a built-in feature known as the “related items” feature to help with this process. This is pre-programmed in RB Retail and Service Solutions to alert employees of relevant add-on items to offer customers, based on what they are already purchasing. Related items might include hose clamps for hoses, water lube for O-rings, and clarifier with bags of filter sand. These “up-sell” items can quickly add large sums of additional profit to your business.

For example, how much profit could you make if every customer purchasing a new filter hose was up-sold hose clamps (which are $2.50 and every customer needs two). If your staff were prompted by the software to suggest those hose clamps to 500 customers buying hoses, that alone would result in $2,500 worth of profit from the related item feature. Imagine the gain if the item had a much bigger profit margin! In our POS software, the related item message will automatically pop up at the time of the sale, so staff are prompted to sell add-on items. You can set up unlimited related items to up-sell, and keep a few of those items close to the registers or store exits for easy access.

Cross-selling is another way to increase your profits during the busy summer, by communicating to your staff the prompts to encourage additional product purchases that make the final sale significantly higher in value. For example, a customer who is purchasing an eco-friendly salt-chlorine generator for their pool could be encouraged to purchase an energy efficient pool pump, an automatic chemical controller, or even an automatic pool cover, as all of these products are designed to reduce chemical usage, reduce energy usage and conserve heat and water. The RB Retail & Service software allows retailers to pre-program these items and questions into your POS pool and spa retail software, making it easier for sales associates to suggest these cross-sell products, even when they are busy helping customers in line.

Ultimately, communicating clearly, frequently, and easily with employees will:

• Create a more unified and engaged staff
• Help your team better understand its customers
• Grow your customer base
• Generate more profits