AN AI CHATBOT FOR LOCAL SMALL BUSINESS RETAILERS: 24/7 HELP
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No script, just a person who knows retail
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Who picks up the phone when you call the POS software help desk?
When you call the Tower Systems help desk, a person answers. They are in Australia or New Zealand. They don’t read from a script.
It could be Mitch, Minh, Roy, James, Tash, Travis, Simon, Paul, Michael or someone else on the team. Real people with real names, not an anonymous avatar or a generic email address. Real people delivering real support. Retail is personal, after all.
W’ve built software for independent retailers since 1981. In that time we’ve watched plenty of software companies move support offshore, add phone trees and hand staff a flowchart. We understand why. It’s cheaper.
It is also worse for the retailer on the other end of the line. So we haven’t done it.
Why scripts let retailers down
A script works when every problem looks the same. Retail problems rarely do.
Think about a Saturday morning. There’s a queue at the counter. A barcode won’t scan, or a supplier invoice has landed with the wrong pricing. You don’t want to be asked whether you’ve restarted your computer. You want someone who listens, works out what’s actually going on and helps you fix it.
Scripted support makes you prove you’ve done steps one to five before anyone will think about step six. That costs you time. Time at the counter costs you sales.
It also costs trust. Most retailers can tell within a minute whether the person on the line understands their business.
What you get from a person who can think
Our help desk team knows our software well. They also know the businesses we serve: newsagents, gift shops, garden centres, jewellers, farm supply businesses and more. They know what a lotto reconciliation looks like or how a layby works, because they talk to retailers about these things every day.
Without a script, they can do the obvious thing. Ask a question that fits your situation. Skip the steps that don’t apply. Notice when a small fault points to a bigger one. Follow up when they said they would.
Being local helps too. Our team works in your time zone and knows Australian and New Zealand trading conditions. Support is available six days a week, with after-hours help for urgent system-down problems.
I think this is the part people don’t see in a software demonstration. Features matter. But the day something goes wrong, the person who answers matters more.
Where AI helps, and where it hands over
We use AI too. Our help desk chatbot has been running for more than three years. Customers tell us it saves them time on quick questions, and that it answers in plain language.
It is there for the simple things, at any hour. It is not a wall between you and a person. When a problem needs judgement, experience or a conversation, you can reach a human on our team.
We chose that balance on purpose. The chatbot takes care of the quick questions, so our team has more time for the calls that need them.
A question to ask any software company
If you are comparing retail software, call each company’s help desk before you sign. See who answers. See whether they listen or read.
Then call ours.
Australia: 1300 662 957
New Zealand: 0800 444 367
Email: sales@towersystems.com.au
Contacting a human is easy.
Running your shop when you’re not in it
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Most independent retailers want to be on the shop floor. Life doesn’t always allow it. A holiday, a sick day, a trip to see family, a second job. There are plenty of reasons you can be away from the shop.
Here’s something we hear often from customers. Time away is when they see the business most clearly. Standing behind the counter, you see the next customer and the next delivery. Step back, and you see the patterns.
Remote management is normal in small business retail
Managing remotely is common in our part of retail. Some owners hold down a job elsewhere while the shop builds. Others own two, three or more shops and can only be in one place at a time.
How you manage remotely is your call. So is whether you group several shops together for a single view of the numbers. Some owners want everything combined. Others prefer to keep each shop separate.
We’ve built Tower Systems to be as flexible as possible here. The setup you start with can change as your needs change. Add a shop, step back from the counter, or bring in a manager, and the software adapts with you.
Our software also runs in-store or in the cloud. You choose what suits the way you work.
The numbers come to you
You don’t need to be in the shop to know how the day went. Business intelligence reports and management functions are available wherever you log in.
Some of it happens without you lifting a finger. When a staff member closes the register and runs the end-of-shift procedure, the day’s sales and key figures are emailed to you straight away.
If the cash or EFTPOS balance is out, you know that evening. Not at the end of the month, when it’s harder to track down.
Alerts when something doesn’t look right
The software also watches for unusual activity in-store. If a staff member discounts a big-ticket item too heavily, or cancels more sales than usual, you get to find out without having to jump through hoops.
You can log in, look at the transaction and deal with it quickly. Small problems are much easier to fix before they become habits.
Admin on your own time
Remote access also means you can fit software work around your day.
If you’re on the counter most of the week, or short a staff member, stock maintenance and other admin can wait until you’re off the floor. Electronic invoices that suppliers send overnight can be processed over breakfast at home.
That leaves shop time for the work that grows sales: displays, customers and your team.
One approach for every kind of specialist shop
We see owners of bookshops, gift shops, garden centres, bike shops, jewellers and rural supply stores manage this way. The approach is the same across all of them. You can step away from the floor and still know what’s happening.
Built for every kind of specialist retailer
Bookshop, gift shop, farm supply business, bike shop, garden centre or jewellery store, the approach is the same. You can step away from the floor and still know exactly what is happening while you are not there.
Talk to us
If you’d like to see how remote management would work for your shop, or across several shops, talk to us. We’ll show you the options and help you choose the setup that suits you now, knowing it can change later.
AU 1300 662 957 | NZ 0800 444 367 | sales@towersystems.com.au
Contacting a human is easy.
If you have dead stock in your shop you have to ask: what am I doing wrong?
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Helping your shop build healthier cashflow, step by step
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Cashflow is tight for many small business retailers. Some days it feels like sliding down a hill, with bills arriving faster than the takings.
There is rarely a single fix. Healthier cashflow tends to come from steady work on the basics, done well and done often.
That is where we focus Tower Systems POS software: on the reliable steps that lead to success in retail.
The first is a deeper shopper basket. When each customer buys a little more, takings grow without needing more people through the door. Knowing which products sell together, and placing them well, helps.
Margin is another. Every sale is worth more when your pricing reflects your costs, and software that makes margin visible helps you see where it is leaking away.
Buying is a big one. Overbuying ties up cash in stock that sits on the shelf, while underbuying means missed sales. Buying from your actual sales history gets you much closer to the right quantity.
Then there is theft. Stock that disappears is cash that disappears, and tools that help you spot unusual patterns give you a chance to do something about it.
None of these steps is dramatic on its own, and none needs to be. Cashflow improves through dozens of small, sensible decisions made every week. Our software is designed to make those decisions easier and better informed.
We make POS software only for local small retail businesses. That focus shapes the reports we build and the way we think about stock and pricing.
It also means the software suits the way local shops actually trade, with small teams, limited time and owners who look after a bit of everything, from buying to rostering to serving at the counter.
Every day, the software helps the retailers we serve build healthier cashflow, one sound decision after another.
If cashflow is a constant worry, start small. Pick your slowest moving stock or your lowest margin department, make one change and watch what happens over a month. Then move on to the next thing.
If you would like to see how our software could support those steps in your shop, get in touch.
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To reach us, call 1300 662 957 (AU) or 0800 444 367 (NZ), or email sales@towersystems.com.au.
What Don’t You Know About Your Shop? A question for indie retailers
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Cash flow advice for small business retailers, from people who see the numbers every day
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In our work serving small business retailers in Australia and New Zealand we get to talk more than software. Often we talk business. Cashflow is a regular topic: how to improve it, how to strengthen the financial basis of the business.
This post today is about cashflow in local small retail businesses. It draws on our many years of experience seeing data from a range of businesses.
Retail businesses rarely close because they were unprofitable on paper. They close because they ran out of cash. Profit is an opinion until the money is in the bank, and cash flow is where good retail habits show up or fall apart.
Here is our best practice advice, drawn from decades of watching what works.
Treat stock as cash, because it is. Every dollar on your shelves is a dollar you cannot use anywhere else. The single biggest cash flow lever in most shops is buying. Buy to sell-through, using your own sales data, rather than buying to the rep’s suggested order or to what you bought last year. Our POS software shows what is selling, at what rate, by supplier and category, so reorders reflect your shop and not someone else’s optimism.
Quit dead stock quickly. Stock that has not sold in six months is cash going stale. Discount it, bundle it, clear it, and put the money into lines that turn. The reports make dead stock easy to find. Acting on it takes discipline, and the retailers with the healthiest cash positions do it routinely rather than annually.
Know your cash rhythm weekly. Once a week, look at what came in, what went out, and what is due in the next fortnight. Fifteen minutes. The retailers who do this are never ambushed by a BAS payment or a big supplier invoice, because they saw it coming. Xero integration in our software keeps the accounting side current without rekeying.
Put GST and tax money aside as you go. It was never yours. A separate account you sweep weekly saves the quarterly scramble that damages so many small retailers.
Watch the seasonal calendar in both directions. Christmas stock is paid for months before it sells, so plan the cash dip as deliberately as you plan the range. Coming out of a season, mark down fast while shoppers are still in the mood. February is a terrible time to be holding December stock.
Chase the money you are owed. If you run customer accounts, invoice promptly and follow up without embarrassment. Our software manages debtors, statements and credit limits, and retailers who moved to systematic follow-up tell us they freed up thousands they had simply stopped noticing.
Build recurring revenue where your business allows it. Storage, locker rental, service plans and memberships smooth the lumps in retail cash flow. Recurring billing is built into our software and it is underused.
Mind the leaks. Transaction fees clipped from every sale, software add-ons, terminal charges: individually small, together meaningful. We do not take a percentage of your sales or charge per transaction, on any tier, and you choose your own EFTPOS provider. Check what your current setup costs across a full year, since the sticker price is rarely the whole story.
Be frugal in your capital spending. Is the planned investment in a shopfit necessary? Does the car upgrade have to be done this year? Is that piece of equipment really going to pay for itself?
Be frugal with the day to day? Are you paying someone to clean the shop? Are you paying for a bookkeeping service that, with AI, you could cover yourself today? Is you advertising spend bringing new shoppers in?
Be the asset. It’s easy to roster someone to work so you can have an easier day. That rostered hour costs real money and while you working the shop floor has a cost, it’s a different cost to paid labour.
None of this requires an accounting degree. It requires accurate data, a weekly habit, and software that shows you the truth about your shop quickly. If your current system makes any of this hard, that is a cost too.
What all this really comes down to is being frugal. Now that can sound negative. It’s not. It’s about leaving more cash in your bank, it’s about making you richer in and from your business.
We are glad to talk cash flow and show you the reports live. Book a demo at towersystems.com.au/pos-software-free-demo.html or call 1300 662 957 (AU), 0800 444 367 (NZ).
Yes, there is software made for specialty toy and game shops
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So what’s best: loyalty points or a cash discount?
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If you’re thinking about building your own POS software, watch this first
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All software has bugs, it’s how software companies deal with them that matters
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Why some retail staff steal and how to detect it
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Hey indie retailers: Winter doesn’t have to be quiet
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Winter is hard on local independent retail. The footpath empties, people rug up at home, and the daily count drops. Many retailers wait it out. You don’t have to.
A small shop can try things a chain would never sign off on. Six weeks of paperwork for them, a Tuesday afternoon decision for you. Winter is when that’s worth using.
From us this Sunday, here are six ideas to get you thinking about the season differently.
- Make your shop warm and welcoming. Put the kettle on. Hot coffee, tea, hot chocolate. Run a slow cooker with a good vegetable soup going all day. Warm cookies or muffins. Comforting music. You could project a film onto a back wall, just for something different. Give people somewhere to stand a wet umbrella and dry off. Be the shop locals talk about loving in winter.
- Host a winter event. Pick an evening, lock the door to the public, put on something just for your regulars. After hours, relaxed, a bit of fun. Warm cider or mulled wine does the job.
- Take the shop to people who can’t get out. Ring the local retirement villages and nursing homes. Pack up a selection of stock and take it on the road. The cold keeps plenty of good customers at home, so go to them.
- Offer free delivery. If the road trip isn’t for you, run a delivery service instead. Someone stuck inside still wants their fix. Be the retailer who bothers.
- Run a summer sale in the dead of winter. Pick the coldest week and throw a blow-out. Call it a Sizzling Sale. Warm people up with the prices.
- Put on an art show. Display art, photos and things your own shoppers have made. It brightens the place, and people come back to see their work on the wall.
A couple more worth a thought. If you’re somewhere genuinely cold, an extra outer door keeps the warmth in. They do it all over Europe and the US. And the July school holidays land right in the middle of all this, so a small winter activity for kids can pull a whole family in.
None of this is about discounting your way through a quiet season. It’s about making the place somewhere people want to be when it’s grey outside. That’s the kind of thing a big business won’t get around to. You can.
These are tips from our crew of retail experienced professionals.
Here at Tower Systems we’re not your average software company.
Saturday trading is its own thing
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Saturday is not a weekday. Anyone who has worked a counter knows that. The flow is different, the basket is different, and people ask for different things.
Most shops are open today. Yours probably is. Trouble is, being open all day doesn’t tell you much about how the day actually traded and how it compared to other Saturdays.
Here’s a fair question. Can your POS software show you how today stacks up against your recent Saturdays? Not the last few days. The last few Saturdays, because Saturdays are different.
A Tuesday won’t tell you anything useful about a Saturday. The two days don’t trade the same way, so comparing them is a waste of time. Put a Saturday up against other Saturdays and you can see what’s really going on.
Tower Systems POS software does exactly that. It compares a single day of the week against itself over time. Line up today against your recent Saturdays in a few clicks and you’ll spot things. Maybe the morning carries the day and the afternoon drops off. Maybe a category sells on a Saturday that barely moves midweek. Those are the openings you miss when every day blurs into one number.
It’s this type of granular insight that can show you opportunities into which you can lean. We created the single day performance comparison because retailers had the need. This was back when Saturdays were completely different to the weekday for certain types of retailers.
It’s specialist insights like this that can really matter in local small business retail. They are insights that generic software tend to not cover because, well, they are generic after all.
One more thing about today. Our help desk is open. Real people, working this Saturday, ready to help retailers who are trading right now. Local support for local retailers. Some software companies don’t bother on a weekend. We do.
So, having said all that and rambled a bit, have a good Saturday. Trade well. Make it could. And, leverage your data for today and see how it compared to other Saturdays.
We’re working too. Give us a call.
Your POS software does what you tell it. That is the problem.
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Good POS software is flexible. It has to be, because no two retail businesses run the same way. But flexibility cuts both ways. The same setting that suits one shop can quietly cost another shop thousands.
Selling by department key is the clearest example we see.
Our Tower systems POS software lets you sell by department, without scanning individual items. There are situations where that makes sense. A shop selling one-off, unbarcoded items, where stock control adds no value, can reasonably ring sales through a department key and move on.
Most retail businesses are not that shop.
When you sell by department key instead of scanning each item, you give up visibility of stock movement. You cannot see what actually sold, only that something sold for a dollar value in a category. You cannot see what should be on the shelf. Which means you cannot see what is missing.
That is where theft hides. Customer theft and employee theft both thrive in businesses that do not scan, because nobody can prove what walked out the door. Owners in this situation often discover the problem months or years later, usually when the numbers stop adding up in a way too big to ignore. By then the money is gone.
Scanning every item at the point of sale is the foundation everything else is built on. Theft reduction. Accurate reordering. Knowing your fast sellers and your dead stock. Faster serving at the counter. Sales data you can actually make decisions with. Sell by department key and you pay for all of those benefits without receiving any of them.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: when this goes wrong, the software is not the problem. The software is doing exactly what it was told to do through settings the business owner controls. We built the tools for proper item-level retail management. Whether they get used is a decision made in each shop, every day, at every sale.
The good news is that bad settings are fixable, usually quickly. If your business is selling by department key, or scanning some items and not others, talk to us. We will review how you are using the software, show you what visibility you are missing, and help you tighten it up.
We have seen what unscanned retail costs. We would rather help you avoid it.
We are here to help, with practical support for local independent retailers.
Advice for local retailers: Sell what people love. The margin is better and so is the business.
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Here is some advice from outside the usual territory of a POS software company. After more than forty years working with local independent retailers, we have seen this pattern too many times to keep it to ourselves.
You will make more money selling what people love than what they need.
The needs are easy to spot in any local shop. Newspapers. Basic stationery. Phone credit. Customers buy these on autopilot and they know what they should cost, which is why the margin is thin. Nobody drives across town for a packet of pens.
What people love is different. A gift that made them laugh. The plush their child will not sleep without. A coin release, trading cards, a greeting card so right for the occasion that price never came up. Emotional purchases hold their margin because there is nothing to compare them against. Customers travel for them. Some will queue.
We watch this play out in the sales data flowing through our software every day, in newsagencies, gift shops, garden centres, jewellers, toy shops. The retailers growing profit are steadily shifting floor space from need to love. The ones standing still are usually the ones defending shelf space for products that stopped earning it years ago.
None of this means abandoning the needs. They bring reliable, habitual traffic, and that traffic is an asset. The trick is what you put in its path. The newspaper customer who leaves with a $30 candle did not come in for a candle. The school supplies shopper was not looking for Squishmallows until they were.
If you are unsure where the love is in your shop, your POS data already knows. Look at what sells at full price. Look at gross profit dollars per square metre by category. Look at what customers ask you to order in, because a special order is a customer telling you what your range is missing.
The software counts the sales. The advice about what to sell comes from decades alongside local retailers, and we share it freely. That is what we mean when we say we are more than a software company.
Sell what people love. Use what they need to introduce them to it.
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