Comprehensive Approach to Customer Experience Quality Assessment in the Context of Sales Management Goals and Rising Retail Trade Competition Trends

In the current conditions of increased retail trade competition, which include the pandemic, further decrease in consumers’ purchasing power, tougher competition between federal and regional retail chains and digitalization, it is crucial to improve the customer experience quality, ensuring its compliance with new customers’ requirements and the opportunities presented by digital technologies. In this context, the need to solve the problem of improving the validity of the assessment of the customer experience quality, which is considered the most important object of sales management and a factor of competitiveness of trading companies, becomes particularly relevant. The study of various approaches to conducting this assessment made it possible to identify such problems as lack of consensus on the essence of the concept of ‘customer experience quality’, incomplete accounting of factors affecting the customer experience quality, lack of systematization of indicators of its assessment, insufficient development of approaches to assessing the customer experience quality compared to the competitors. The author clarified the definition of ‘customer experience’ from the standpoint of the interests of trade companies interested in assessing the customer experience quality as a tool that provides an increase in the level of sales management and competitiveness. Based on the proposed approach to the systematization of indicators for assessing the customer experience quality, an integrated approach to its assessment is presented, which allows not only calculating integral indicators for assessing the customer experience quality and comparing it with that of competitors, but also private indicators that allow identifying directions of its improvement.

Nowe wyzwania w zarządzaniu sprzedażą w kontekście rozwoju nowoczesnych technologii i pandemii COVID-19

The purpose of the article is to systematize the knowledge on sales strategy and answer the question of whether current socio-economic conditions in the form of progressive digitalization and evolution of the sales function induce to update the definition of sales strategy. Furthermore, the study aims to verify whether the COVID-19 pandemic forces companies to reformulate their sales strategy. A non-systematic literature review supplemented by qualitative research was used as the research method. The first part of the paper presents the theoretical backgrounds of the analysis based on the literature review. The second part presents the results of the own research, enriched by the data from existing studies. Then, the results of the conducted discussion are presented. The final part of the paper contains a summary and the author's definition of sales management, focusing on sales strategy and a potential direction for future research. According to the analysis, the greatest challenge in implementing the assumed sales strategy is currently the COVID-19 pandemic, which significantly affects consumer behavior and limits market activities. However, with widespread access to advanced technologies and a flexible approach to strategy, most of the surveyed companies can meet their financial targets despite the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. When defining a sales strategy, it is necessary to consider the aspect of progressing digitalization and the evolution of the sales function, closely integrated with the marketing function.

An intelligent web-based point of sales management system for small and medium scale businesses

The increase in population globally has caused organisations and businesses to move from square rooms, table-top and containers into supermarkets, malls and more. With this expansion in businesses, the traditional pen and paperwork system for keeping records are becoming more difficult for salespersons and shop owners everywhere. However, the introduction of the point-of-sales management system and advancement in technologies have elevated the challenges facing shop owners in managing their daily sales and balance sheet. Despite the overwhelming number of POS systems available, wholesalers and retailers' in low-income counties such as Ghana see some challenges with the existing POS, cost-effectiveness, and user-friendliness. Thus, the cultural difference makes it difficult for easy adaptation of shop owners to off-the-shell POS system. Hence, the current study sought to design and develop a user-friendly, low-cost intelligent web-based point of sales management system for small and medium scale business in the Bono region of Ghana, based on a user-centred approach. Using a waterfall model, we implement a POS system based on XAMP server and MySQL database as backend and PHP for server-side scripting. At the same time, HTML and CSS were used for front end development. Our experimental setup with ten students shows that the proposed system is easy to use and robust. Thus, it has a user-friendly interface for even novice to learn it with ease.