Customer Displays

Customer displays are one of the key feedback devices for your customer relationships in a EPOS retail software solution

The traditional customer display is a 2 line LED display, mounted on a pole to face the customer. This means they are also know as pole displays and tower displays.

Their normal use is to inform the customer of each item and price as it is rung up. At the completion of a sale, the customer display normally shows the total amount due. Other marketing related information can also be displayed.

The tradidtional tower display will usually have a serial interface, which can plug into one of the computers COM ports. However there is an unusual trick here. Many receipt printers have a plug on the back which will take a customer display. This means that the customer display plugs into the receipt printer, and the receipt printer plugs into the computers serial power – thus only tying up on port.

Provided that your EPOS retail software is programmed by the supplier to take advantage of this fact, this system works well. However, it is important to make sure that your EPOS software is compatible with this arrangement. Your EPOS retail software also needs to be compatible with each particular tower display – especially with respect to particular features like the number of characters on each row of this display.

USB interface customer displays are also available.

Customer displays usually have some DIP switches hidden away in their structure – your EPOS retail software supplier will tell you have these should be configured. If you get these wrong, you’ll find the tower display doesn’t work at all with your EPOS software, or that certain characters like pound signs are displayed as weird characters.

Therefore it is important to only buy the customer displays recommended by your EPOS retail supplier – in fact, it is normally best to let your solution provider supply and configure these items for you . The last thing you want to be told when having problems with retail hardware is that they do not support it because they did not supply it – this can mean another pointless bill to pay.

Most tower customer displays come with a mounting kit to bolt them to your shop counter – this is important because these displays are very top heavy and will fall over all the time – most shop fitters will be comfortable with doing this. Remember that you need a hole underneath for the signal and power cables. The display will need its own independent power supply.

My normal advise is, where possible, don’t bother with customer displays. In a lot of retail environments, you can get away without them – they just take up space in most situations.

A more modern approach is to use either an additional monitor or a specialist double sided monitor. These means you can show the customer a whole host of information whilst they are waiting for you to ring up their shopping. Special offers, events and general marketing can be beamed at the customer when they have got nothing better to do than look at it! Of course, your EPOS retail software solution provider will have to either interface their software to the second display, or you can get a third party to make up a “movie” of marketing material to show.