Have you ever felt the joy and agony of having a line of people at your booth waiting to place and order or buy a product? The joy, of course, is that you are selling product the agony is the "walk-away" factor--you are too busy to handle the crowd that has curiously amassed. I watched the book buying and ordering process in the booth of a German publisher at a medical congress in Vienna earlier this year. Everything was hand written on NCR 3 part invoices. Credit cards were imprinted (that's a big liability exposure issue and #PCIcompliance issue) and each order took about five minutes. It was like watching a movie where you see someone walking into peril and you have a hard time watching it because you can't help them. I'm sure the publisher was happy that they were so busy, but they were clueless as to the large numbers of would-be customers who walked away, saying to themselves, "I'll come back when it isn't so busy." That, of course, rarely comes true.
Have you ever thought of automating this process with PC's? We were asked to do this "POS for Trade Shows" solution a few years ago for a US-based publisher, and it has dramatically changed their numbers and their public image while exhibiting and selling at trade shows. What took ten minutes now takes 90 seconds, so order volume has increased. Customers walk away with a clean invoice and a great experience just like they have in a bookstore. The publisher, though, gets something even better: complete customer contact and profiling data.
If you could create your own system for selling products or taking orders in your booth, what would it do and how would it function--and what benefits would you see it providing in the long run for your company?
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