– Tina Royall reviews how customer feedback has helped to shape EPOS developments

It’s been an exciting year for Futura as more and more retail brands use our EPOS and inventory control systems to support their growing

Saltrock Saunton

businesses. New clients include Saltrock, a north Devon lifestyle brand; Santoro, a global retailer of design-led gifts and apparel; Steel and Jelly, a contemporary menswear brand; and Max 99p, one of the UK’s newest fixed-price retailers.

Our long-standing client, Cath Kidston, has expanded into Japan using Futura4POS to consolidate its Japanese network of 27 stores. After much planning and preparation the consolidation was carried out overnight to ensure business continuity. Cath Kidston now has a complete instore retail model with a Japanese front end (including a fully-translated product catalogue) integration with new third-party warehousing and logistics, CRM and Loyalty Rewards. This network in Japan links back to head office systems in the UK for daily retail management tasks, including allocations and merchandising, all in real time.

Feedback from our customers is always welcome and much appreciated. Your comments have led to many new innovations and improvements, including the new customer entry screen. This is now much more intuitive to use, enabling quicker searching and faster postcode lookup. It is now configurable to allow more custom information capture. It also helps to reduce customer duplication by checking, during the wizard-style customer creation process, whether the customer already exists.

New customer capture screen

The new screen features faster email capture – particularly useful for our yReceipts application, as customers can receive a digital receipt emailed to their inbox, straight from the till. Receipts can be fully customised to maintain store branding and can include targeted offers, real-time feedback and social media integration to increase customer interaction.  Click here to read how 73 Retail have benefitted from this functionality already.

Timberland Email Receipt

Another new innovation in 2015 is the new web link API, with its ability to handle Click and Collect functionality, i.e. to send item information, whilst capturing sales, customer, and stock data in a ‘live feed’.

Many customers have gone contactless, including Morleys, Cath Kidston, Oliver Bonas, TJ Hughes, London Zoo, Saltrock, and Frosts, to name but a few. This is certainly a future trend that we see continuing. Incidentally, we post all announcements about new functionality, new product launches and latest company information on Twitter, so please do follow us @Futura4retail.

2016 promises to be an equally exciting year, when we will release our new simplified POS customer order screen. This will mean faster data entry, enabling more efficient customer service and a more user-friendly, wizard-style customer order process guiding customers smoothly through the retail experience. It will also feature a touch-based stock lookup that can be launched from the POS.

Also in 2016, look out for the launch of our new points-based loyalty system for online and in store. A Real time solution that will allow the customer to earn points and redeem them at the POS.

Thank you for your interest in Futura and we look forward to working with you in 2016 and beyond.