Retail Acumen is the new name for ARC-Retail.

Please visit our fantastic new website at

www.retailacumen.com

Given the massive investment in time and effort, range planning, product development, product selection, buying, logistics, storage and transport wouldn't it be crazy to loose a customer because the experience of attempting to purchase a product was so painful they walked away? That moment of interaction with the customer be it in store, on the website or through a call centre is a "moment of truth". The experience, which may only last for a moment, creates an impression, which in the eyes of the customer is their "truth".

ARC Retail has the experience all too often of those moments being irritating, frustrating and incredibly disjointed - the assumption is everyone else does too. That was why when ARC Retail encountered its partner company, Unipower Solutions, for the first time, their simple message was so compelling.

Imagine a process driven customer ordering system that prompted the order taker, be they in store, in a call centre or indeed a website, to walk through every aspect of the customer order ensuring key considerations were captured at the point of ordering. No more experiences in department stores where the Saturday staff have to call over the full timer to help place an order - by which time the kids have tried your patience one too many times and you've dragged them out of the store having lost the will to wait. Sound familiar? Sadly it is very familiar, but now there is a tool to enable anyone to take an order in a manner which is efficient and pleasing to the customer. The beauty is each product purchase may trigger a list of steps, but that's all predefined. The operative simply responds to on screen prompts, the customer is duly impressed. The second benefit is the same process can be triggered regardless of sales channel - this is a true multi-channel solution. The only difference will be the front end presentation medium, the back end system remains the same. Finally, and for the technical minded out there, this tool is based on MS SQL 2005 technologies and is a completely thin client - this means gone are the days of each store having to have an EPOS server to collate the data and then send it on to the main head office servers. This is a real-time upload to the main servers. The hardware investment is massively reduced. The business benefit that can be achieved with real time upload is also incredible. Not only can fraud and shrinkage be spotted practically as it happens using the sophisticated data mining techniques inherent in the tools but for key promotions, new lines or highly volatile / seasonal products in-day sales and stock exception reporting can be generated to give an early warning to performance beyond what was expected.

ARC Retail with Unipower Solutions can change the way customers experience interaction with retailers. They can provide relevant, meaningful information to key decision makers with an immediacy not common in many solutions and all of that from a much lower investment in hardware.

So, if you want to give your customers "moments of truth" that keeps them coming back and spending more get in touch with us.