What piece of technology do you wish would be invented that you feel would improve your jewelry business?
I actually just invented the technology that we thought would improve our business. It’s an inventory-management system we are calling the Diamond Bar, and it’s a diamond-selling system that leverages the power of technology and pricing to map out the price of diamonds.
We built a database that contains about 1.1 million diamonds across the world that are listed for wholesale. We can then map out the price of a diamond based on this by pulling information on every diamond in the world that matches it.
We then take our retail markup, and then list the price at which we would be willing to buy the diamond at any point in time, regardless of where it was purchased. This allows our customers to be privy to the back end of the industry, so we are kind of lifting the veil in the industry in terms of the pricing to make it fair for the customer.
I know there are a ton of CRMs [customer relationship management programs] out there, but I feel that we would do so well to have a CRM that integrated with our point-of-sale system and also communicated with our email systems, no matter what we selected, to automate the majority of our processes.
That would be fantastic.
What I would really like is a super easy, user-friendly means of doing a video call with a customer that had multiple camera angles that could show me on screen at one angle and the jewelry in front of me at another, so I can work with remote customers better.
You can do a call with Zoom or FaceTime, but you have to set up different cameras, and that makes it quite complicated. I want something that has it all in one and is easy to use.
Our biggest problem is having enough help in the store to keep the customers busy while we help other people. Right now, we have so much traffic, we are getting annihilated.
What we really need is an in-store, interactive chat bot to help waiting customers whittle down what they are looking for and show them different options.
That way, it entertains them while they’re waiting and it minimizes time spent with them because we already know what they’re looking for by the time they get to us.
Kelly Newton
Owner, Newton’s Jewelers, Forth Smith, ArkansasMain mage: Spicer Greene Jewelers; Nelson Coleman Jewelers; Henne Jewelers; Newton’s Jewelers
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