Employee and customer happiness in bakeries – with pre-orders
According to a study by the Research Center for Retail Management (IRM-HSG), bricks-and-mortar retail has slightly overtaken online retail in the DACH region – particularly in Germany and Austria. In order to maintain this trend, retailers should also consider reasons for abandoned purchases. According to the study, these include the lack of product availability. Pre-orders are an interesting option, especially for bakeries.
Why pre-orders?
Regardless of whether an item has not yet been produced, is not currently available or will only be released in a few weeks or months due to seasonal factors: pre-orders are a good way to satisfy and retain customers and ensure that they leave the store happy with their product in the near future. At the same time, they help to boost sales and reduce waiting times. For bakeries, pre-ordering baked goods has long been a matter of course.
However, if employees record pre-orders manually, bakers and confectioners add an additional organizational burden to their business. This is because handwritten notes and a jumble of slips of paper quickly lead to confusion. When is the planned collection day? When should employees inform the customer? Has he made a down payment? Questions that are time-consuming to clarify in the paper jungle.
Pre-orders: Secure. Digital. Modern.
Bakeries avoid this problem with secure and electronic recording, for example via our ITR checkout. When the customer places a pre-order, the employee records it in the cash register. The customer in turn receives a printed receipt to make it easier to assign the order when it is collected.
The system enables the customer to be clearly identified. The desired and planned collection day can also be recorded. To avoid confusion, employees simply enter information in the receipt as to whether an optional cash or cashless deposit has already been made.
Beyond customer contact, bakeries can continue to create transparency with this solution. The pre-order and customer information can be automatically transferred to the company headquarters. Data exports to third parties such as merchandise management or the back office also enable good networking as well as direct planning and consideration in production.
When the day of collection arrives, customers in the bakeries benefit from a smooth process: they present the receipt, the employee views all the information and issues the corresponding item after receiving the (remaining) payment. The ITR checkout also makes it easy to add spontaneous additional items to the bakery shop.
Strengthen customer satisfaction.
There is hardly any way around digital support when it comes to offering pre-orders safely and easily. However, bakeries should not only focus on transferring manual processes to the digital world. Other functions such as interfaces to the inventory also offer added value. However, the focus should always be on creating efficient processes for both retailers and customers. After all, they make a significant contribution to a positive customer experience.
Would you also like to offer customer pre-orders in your bakery or streamline your existing processes? We can help you!
