Recently I was speaking with our most recent client and something came up that I have always wanted to comment on. He stated that he wanted to get a new system for quite a while but was reluctant for, in his own words, “all the effort involved and the time it would take to implement a new system”. Well I put this into the category of ‘fear of change’.
After speaking with him for a while and getting into his mindset, the real issues were “he’s a retailer, not an I.T professional”. I love new software and new changes, it’s my job to love it. He on the other hand was a retailer and he loves retail. With all the advances in I.T proclaiming to help his business grow through technology, he was scared that this would overwhelm him. Being a retailer for the last 15 years, he didn’t have time to advance any I.T skills and didn’t really know what kind of benefits it would bring, though he knew he needed it.
I.T for retail wasn’t around 15 years ago. For him only Big companies had the money and the know how to implement such a system. Oh how times have changed thank God!
It was easy to explain to him what the benefits are. He could see the benefits himself as we went through a demo of Microsoft’s Retail Management System. To say the least, he loved it, but still I felt he was reluctant to buy. “Why?” I was asking him.
As it turns out, he thought he was going to have to learn about databases, relationships to tables and all in between! “NO” I explained . That’s OUR job and your job is the retail business. You don’t need to be an I.T professional to use these systems or even have any real experience with computers I explained. The I.T element is left to us and your business left to you.
After the first days training he was like a professional, loving the system and seeing all the benefits in his own business on his own EPoS system. I suppose the moral of this is that changing to EPoS, seeing the benefits first hand and being a retailer there should be no “fear of change”. Get a good I.T Supplier and let them worry about I.T.
By the way, using his system this particular customer saved €25,000 in the first 3 months on a turnover of €1.5 Million per annum. As I said, with a good Retail I.T partner and without “Fear of Change”, is it worth it? You do the math.
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