Together they’re a winning team. NO ORDINARY CASH REGISTER Day to day, Marisa and her mother depend on staff designers to fill orders, preferring to focus their time on running the business. And today, focusing on business means focusing on technology, which the pair works diligently to stay on top of. Early adopters of Teleflora’s Eagle POS system, they recently switched to Dove POS. While many florists regard their cash register as just another office machine, at Debbie’s Bloomers the Dove POS is a full-blown marketing system that supports the shop’s business strategy. “We’ve had a POS system for 20 years, and it pains me to see how many shops still don’t see their value,” says Marisa. “A lot of shops are hesitant to adopt POS systems because of the high cost—but with everything these systems can do, they’re hugely advantageous for a business. “One of the best tools a POS system offers is the ability to track the past year’s sales data,” Marisa goes on. “We then use that data to predict future sales, which allows us to anticipate our buying and staffing needs. As you can imagine, that’s especially helpful at the busy holiday seasons of Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day—but it’s just as important during the slow summer months when we don’t want to over-staff. “In addition to using it as a crystal ball, we also use the Dove POS to look up individual customer data. For example, when a corporate customer calls and says, ‘Send whatever we always send,’ we have the past order information at our fingertips. We can look up their last order or check their average purchase amount and quickly finish the sale, then immediately and automatically send them an email showing the order details.” DATA IN, USEFUL INFO OUT Collecting customer emails is part of what makes the POS system work so well as a customer-service and marketing tool. “When we first started asking customers for their email addresses, we got lots of noes,” Marisa reports, “because we made it sound like an optional bit
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