Some Changes at SelbySoft – 4/1/2013
Once again it is that time of the year for SelbySoft to make some significant changes to our software and our company.
1) All font types in SP-1 are now displayed in Comic Sans. We like it and don’t care if people make fun of us.
2) We are replacing all pictures in SP-1 with Instagram versions (yeah – we added a lens flare because it is cool). 
3) We are going to have one gift card design – We call it classic. This should make every one of our customers much happier as there is no artwork to worry about.
4) To make it easier for all our customers to reach us we are changing our phone number to 1.
5) We are going to have SP-1 directly connect to the IRS and your local department of revenue so you don’t have to do your taxes. . . Wait! That’s just a joke! Don’t panic!
6) We are rolling out two new lines of tablet technology. . . A 24″ tablet for those of you that believe bigger is better and a 2.4″ tablet for those of you that like the smaller screens.
7) MobileDash will have some new functionality. If an employee is caught slacking off it will send a high voltage shock their way. We have tested it in house and aside from a tendency to shake uncontrollably there are been no real downsides!
SP-1 will now shoot fireworks and sound sirens when a customer hits their reward level. We feel this will greatly enhance the rewards experience.
9) In the picture below the top left pixel will be changed – we are not saying why.
10) There is no ten – this is just a place holder so the list does not look funny.
Any questions? Hopefully you got that this is all for April Fools’!
Hands-Free Marketing
If you are like most of our customers, you don’t have a lot of free time. Between running your store, working the counter, driving around pickup up supplies, managing employees and trying to balance a life at the same time you are probably buried.
On top of that, you get emails and posts that tell you how you are supposed to stay on top of the social media and market to your customers as well.
SelbySoft realizes where you are at. Heck, half the time, we are there ourselves. It’s tough to find all the time to do the marketing you need. When we looked into email marketing, the prices were $50 to $150 a month or more. Now granted, there was a lot of bang for the buck with some of these but they were simply too expensive to integrate with most of our customers.
We decided to write it ourselves. . .
Hands-Free Marketing is based on email marketing to your current customer base. You collect the emails and we do the email marketing!
Here is how it works:
Every day, SelbySoft grabs the emails from your store. We then eliminate duplicates and automatically email the following:
- All customers that have had a new email address in the last 30 days.
- All customers that have a birthday coming up in the next 30 days.
- All customers that have not used their profile in the last 30 days (lazy customers).
Here is something that makes this even easier! You simply create the email that you want to be presented and send it to us. We take that email and forward it to all of your customers!
The cost? Only $120 a year ($10 a month!) per location.
Interested? Call us today and find out more!
Order Confirmation Monitors
Order confirmation monitors are becoming more and more popular with our customers that are looking to up grade that old pole display into something more effective and exciting.
OCM is fast becoming the way to promote your products from the counter top. With a 9″ or 17″ monitor, this system allows you to promote your products through a slide show of pictures while the customer is thinking about their order. 
Once the customer starts to place their order, the screen changes to show them, clearly, what the employee is entering. This way you have a very exact understanding that the customer will get what they ordered. Further, the side of the screen will still show three up-sell pictures and a scrolling message.
This is a great way to help cut theft as well as the customer knows what the change should be.
3 Things Your Coffee Shop Manager Should Review In Your POS
1) Labor. This is a huge expense in most coffee shops. The owner should work to put together some guidelines on where labor should be and then stick to it. SP-1 can help by showing the labor cost both on the Business Summary and on the Dashboard screen. This gives your coffee shop manager the ability to know where they stand on an hourly basis. If your manager is not in the store all the time, then consider adding them to the MobilDash system so they get alerts on their smartphone.
2) Hourly Sales and Ticket Totals. Using the Hourly Recap By Week report, your manger can make sure that they know when the busy times are based on how many tickets were created. Better yet, this report can be organized by menu group so you know what to plan for during those hours.
3) Voids by Employee. Our Employee Summary report is designed to show you, by employee, the total sales and voids. This is a great way to spot red flags and see what may be happening in your store!
Tablet Point of Sale Systems
Tablets. It seems that we hear about tablet ordering every time we turn around. There are a number of companies jumping on the tablet bandwagon. Is this just fad? I don’t think so. I think the issue with most of the tablet POS systems is that they are focusing on the hardware and “cool” factor and don’t really have any substantial product from a software standpoint.
Does a tablet have a place in coffee shops and restaurants? Yes! Can they add value to a store? Absolutely! What is required is to have a stable, reliable and full featured POS software to integrate in the right way with a tablet.
SelbySoft has been working on a tablet based system for our customers for a while now and we are happy to announce that we have it ready!
This is a complete handheld unit with a 10″ screen that is perfect for mobile orders, table service and line busting or drive thru lanes.
Please call us to learn if a tablet is right for you and to see how we can help!
QR Codes – 5 Suggestions
Do you know what a QR code is? What about how to use them?
Let’s get the definition out of the way first. . . In plain English, a QR code is simply a type of barcode that can be read by a number of app enabled phones (Apple, Androids, Blackberry etc). A QR code can contain all sorts of information in it. Most people (and businesses) are going to only use this to direct people to a spot on the web however.
So you see the funny looking square barcode – scan it with your phone and are taken to a specific website. Pretty simple.
How can you create them?
- Visit one of the links here to create one on the screen (there are more but these both work fine):
- Alt-PrintScreen (this will copy your screen to the Windows clipboard)
- Open PAINT in Windows.
- Ctrl-V (or right click your mouse and paste). This will past the screen into paint. You can then select just the qr code and copy to your documents.
- You can then save this QR Code as a picture and use it in your own literature.
So how can you use these to your benefit? Here are asdf ideas:
Here is a list of five different QR Codes that all do different things:
1) Take them to your website. It’s a great way to promote yourself.
2) Take them to your Facebook page! Let them see your specials, like your page and catch up with the store.
3) If you really want to take it to the next level, create a page on your website that cannot be accessed without going to the direct link. Then the QR points to that link. Print that QR code on your gift card and you now have a special of the month page that customers access by scanning their phone. This example shows how a QR can take a user directly to a specific blog post of mine.
4) Gift card registration. Lori at Crane Coffee does a great job by having her customers register their gift card. A QR code on the card itself can take them there.
5) Sell them stuff. If you sell bagged coffee online then this is a great way to increase sales! By scanning the last QR code above, you will be taken to one of our customers web ordering system with a bag of coffee already placed! Print this QR code on the bottom of a receipt and a customer can scan and order beans. Tie it in with a promotional code on that receipt!
80 Day’s until Christmas – What? You haven’t ordered gift cards?
Don’t you just hate to see how many days we have left for the holiday season? It usually get’s us thinking of everything we have to do before the end of the year.
One thing that makes us cringe is the thought of how many people will wait until the last minute to order gift cards. It happens every year and I don’t expect it to be any different this year.
However, if you are hoping to be different, think about ordering your gift cards as soon as possible for the holiday season. Typically the gift card manufacturers start to be very busy right around Halloween.
Want some information about gift cards? Check out our previous blog posts here and see all the blogs we have written about gift cards.
Need to see some sample cards? Head over to Facebook and see them here.
Don’t wait until the last minute! It will cost you more!
Catering? We can help!
Over the last year we have seen more of our customers look at catering options with their products. Obviously that leads to more calls to us asking how we can help. Fortunately, we already have a number of wants to help with this.
It starts with creating a catering menu. Talk to our support about creating a specific menu group with your catered items. This allows your employees to have one button access to the items you cater and the prices you charge.
When a customer calls in, make sure you use our Customer Tracking system to add the customer. Often these customers
are already in your database and may simply be having you delivery items to a different address. They may even use a different contact number when calling you. In SP-1, we track up to 10 phone numbers per client.
In SP-1, when you add (or edit) a customer, you can select the phone number / email address button to update or add information for the customers profile. In catering this is advantageous because you now can get hold of the direct person that is placing the order if there is a question.
The next step is to use the Additional Addresses button to enter the customers catering address. This is important because you might be providing the items to a different location than what you have on file as the main address.
Once we have the order placed, we have two more options available to us. If you have done catering before then you know that sometimes when the customers calls, they are not actually placing the order right? Sometimes, it’s an office manager or assistant that is calling around to check on pricing. We handle this as well! At the ticket completion screen, you can convert any order into a quote only. What this does is save the order under that customers phone number for future reference. When (if) the customer calls back to place that catering order, you will have all the details laid out in front of you! This allows you to easily and quickly duplicate the previous quote and then turn it into an actual order.
Once the catering order is ready to finish, we can use our Deferred Order system to schedule this order for a future date and time. SP-1 will automatically print your order on the day and time that it is due. We even allow you to set the default time the order should be printed. If it needs to be ready at 4pm the order can print at 3pm! 
So the complete catering options look like this:
- Add customer with multiple phone numbers and addresses
- Take order and turn into a quote
- Duplicate the quote and mark it as a deferred order
- The order then prints automatically at the time it is ready
- Reporting for the manager and owner on all future orders
SP-1 can make this type of coffee shop or restaurant catering easy by implementing the built in features of our POS!
Call us for more information!
Mike.
How to help your coffee shop manager out!
Want to make your coffee shop manager happy? Get them a POS system. Sounds simple doesn’t it? I know, it sounds like a sales ploy to get you to buy a POS – That’s true as well. The fact is that we believe with all our heart that a POS will absolutely help you and your staff (including your manger)!
If you have taken the time to hire and groom a coffee shop manager to help manage your business, then a POS makes a lot of sense for you. Why? Because we know, through experience, that you rely on your manager to maintain the store, monitor employees and report back to you (along with dozens of other things). Without a POS system, your manager will spend part of their time focusing on putting together spreadsheets and emails so you get what you need. There is a better way.
Automate a good chuck of those tasks and allow your manager to focus on the things that are really important. Let them spend their time on coffee education, customer service, training of your staff and generally helping you make more money. With SP-1 as your POS in your coffee shop, you will see that your manager can provide the business information to you with less time wasted. Better than that is that they will have the tools available to them to monitor for themselves what is going on.
For example, your manager can see which hours are peak for sales by touching a few buttons. They can run reports to compare sales by employee to identify where training needs to be spent. You can use up sell suggestions to help not only make more money but also to open the door for customer education on differences between different coffees.
Finally, let’s not forget that YOU, the owner, have to stay on top of the manager and insure that they are doing their job right? Hourly reporting and void tracking are the best ways to do this.
Call us. See how we can help you and your coffee shop manager!
Mike.
MobileDash
New website & blog
Welcome to our new website and blog!
We have been working on this new site for a while and are finally to the point where we can publish the new site. Content will be added to over the next couple weeks (or months).
Our blog has had a “reboot” as well! We have moved from blogger.com to an integrated wordpress blogging system. This give us more control over the content and keeps it on our site as well as making it easier to reach for our customers. All the past blogs have been imported here as well as left on the old site for people to find.
As part of this new “reboot” we will be re-visiting some of the older blogs and updating information, adding more media content and generally trying to do a better job of communicating with our current and future clients!
If you have any suggestions for us, please let us know!
Mike.