SAP Business One for Apparel & Footwear Organizations (SAP AFS)

As mentioned in our previous blog post, How to Successfully Retain Customers in the Apparel Footwear Industry, successfully retaining customers in the Apparel & Footwear industry is boosted with SAP Business One (SAP AFS). This blog will go into detail about how to gain insight into your business with Business One and keep your customers happy.

With SAP Business One, you have a powerful solution that enhances the relationships you have with your customers. With a key function built into Business One’s easy to use interface, you will get access to complete and accurate customer information, including your sales pipeline, backorder lists, credit information, and available promotions.

Since you can easily track the purchase history of each customer, it’s easy to anticipate and suggest relevant upsell and cross-sell opportunities that they will appreciate, especially since you’ll have such quick and easy access to the data that defines which customers are the most frequent. This kind of insight allows you to exceed expectations and meet each customer’s individual needs, which in turn makes them feel taken care.

The more you meet customer needs, the more efficient you are because you can focus resources on the customers that will give you the most profitability in your industry. To keep them happy, and retain them, you want to reward them for their sales activity.

Keeping Customers happy with SAP AFS

1. Offer your customers targeted discounts

For example, say you’re a salesperson at XYZ Clothing Co., an Apparel & Footwear distributor. SAP Business One gives you a single screen where you can see all your key information in a view configured for your sales role. Within Business One, you can access information on sales, services, finance, & purchasing. Today, you want to offer special pricing to one of your customers who purchase from XYZ Clothing Co. regularly.

To accomplish this, you start by accessing the Inventory module within Business One & drilling down into the pricing section. Next, by choosing your customer name, you can bring up that entire customer’s past orders.

In this example, you want to discount a certain style of jean. Find the style of jean in the pricing section and choose how much you want to discount off the base price. You can even save discount information for future reference. Now the customer will automatically get the discount every time they order that style of jean.

Related: Who is Your Target Client?

2. Analyze Sales and Inventory

You just entered a discount for a style of jean for one of your customers. To better understand this customer’s buying pattern, you can easily drill down into their account and see detailed information like ordering patterns, pricing patterns, and more.

Additionally, you can see how long they’ve been active for, what their account balance is, who their main contacts are, what orders and deliveries are outstanding, and what future opportunities are available for the customer. You even have the option to leave notes in a specified section, keeping your colleagues in the loop.

Then, you will want to look at that customer’s transaction history, where Business One gives you analysis and detailed information so you can better manage the account, offer the products your customer needs, and assess sales by month. For example, a graph may show a spike in jean sales every September whereas May and August were slow.

Learn More: SAP Business One: Inventory and Distribution

3. Monitor Product Support

You want to be able to understand and manage the customer’s support needs as time progresses. In Business One, you can easily view past support-related projects that are either opened or closed. By drilling down into any open tickets, you can view information on why and how the project was not completed by looking at the root cause of the issue(s), who initiated the support work, and what the initial issue was. This feature is important because it gives you the option to always follow up with your customer and see why the matter is still open.

With SAP AFS and Third Wave Business Systems for Apparel & Footwear companies, you can stay on top of issues that impact customer satisfaction. As you have learned, SAP AFS can analyze your sales & inventory and monitor product servicing, while making your customers feel important.

To better satisfy your customers and keep them coming back to your Apparel & Footwear company with SAP AFS, contact Third Wave Business Systems today.