If there’s one thing that can be summarized from the past six months it’s that COVID has shown us the magnitude of technological underinvestment in brick and mortar. We’re not talking about the move to contactless-everything, which is a pendulum swing too far in our opinion, but just the inability of retailers to offer omnichannel commerce with unified data lakes and customer data platforms. All of this is predicated on modernized POS systems with stable APIs that move data for payments processing, among other things.
It became apparent that many of the legacy POS companies couldn’t offer such modern use cases, and we’ve seen an accelerated shift to cloud POS. For our case study let’s examine Revel Systems, a cloud POS serving enterprise retail and restaurants.
Since COVID reached American shores in March of 2020, Revel has already signed up 2,000 new sites. For those of us counting, NCR expects to add less than this annually, and during COVID we’d bet this number is even half that as merchants wake up and realize how limiting Aloha has become due to a lack of technological investment.
Revel quickly marshalled resources to give away over $1M to its customers with its Revel Relief program and has deferred subscriptions to help its operators stay afloat. Of course some are still closed, but cloud companies have shown us just how fast they move: Toast, for instance, was able to pump out new features at breakneck speed relative to legacy incumbents. Revel similarly made tweaks to prioritize a contactless environment and it’s shown in their sales numbers.
It’s our opinion that cloud POS companies like Revel will keep winning at increasing speeds. Here are a few bullets that are hard to argue.
- Open APIs. Revel has modern, easy to work with APIs and welcomes anyone into their ecosystem. They focus on enabling the commerce platform and are open to different payment processors, though they do get residuals with the right partnerships. They do not have walled gardens like legacy POS companies.
- Native Cloud. Cloud POS systems are literally an order of magnitude easier to install and support – even ask a reseller who’s sold legacy and cloud solutions if you don’t believe us. Or you can just read this quote from a former NCR customer who moved to a cloud POS system.
The last POS conversion we had to do was our original POS to NCR. It was a total disaster. Additionally, the machines could not handle the amount of business we did and they would crash almost every Monday night. It was so stressful we literally had managers quit. Needless to say, I was not looking forward to our conversion over to a cloud system due to my last experience with NCR. We started ten days ago and we are already done. 21 STORES! … I don’t remember one installation with NCR that went as smoothly as all 21 cloud installations.
We also did not get one complaint in reference to the POS conversion during those ten days. Additionally, although only a short time, my employees love the system so far. I will gladly be an ambassador for you if any franchisee gives you a hard time and doesn’t want to make the change. You can have them call me. NCRs were total pieces of crap and I truly believe cost us business so I look forward to seeing where we go with the new POS systems.
Former NCR Aloha customer who can now stop hating their life after moving to a cloud POS
- Scalable. Cloud POS has crossed the chasm and is now in brands of material size. PAR Brink services Arby’s, Dairy Queen, and Five Guys; Revel’s largest customer is in the thousands of units, and Revel also has over 100 enterprise customers at this point.
- Omnichannel from the get go. Many of these cloud POS companies were built with multiple digital channels in mind, and it’s natural and easy to grow from a POS to kiosks to online ordering and to other channels. This is just a cultural difference as cloud POS companies think about the future much more progressively than legacy counterparts.
- Affordable. When you start adding up costs it’s actually cheaper to own a cloud POS than a legacy system. You could ask large restaurants that have had to build their own solutions on top of legacy POS systems like Aloha to keep the thing modernized and you’ll quickly understand the math.
Getting back to Revel, they’ve continued to invest in R&D all throughout COVID. They recently launched Delivery XT, an advanced delivery module that tracks drivers, texts the order status to consumers, and follows the order from cradle to grave. “We want restaurants who are interested to be able to do online ordering and drive as much business with their own technology solution as opposed to paying 20-30% to third parties, and we’ll continue to enable them as much as possible,” says Chris Lybeer, Revel’s CMO and CSO.
They’ve also launched Online Ordering XT and Kiosk XT, which comes with a new UI, more features, and most importantly, can be more customized to suit your brand. “XT has given our business a boost, especially with young customers who prefer to order online,” says Muhammed Elhasan, CEO of Beach Bowls Acai Cafe.
Lasly, Revel launched Revel Guard XT, a solution that allows for remote upgrades, full monitoring and management of all devices on-site, and eventually will reach into internet of things (IOT) for the store. Hotschedules failed at the IOT component with Bodhi, which as we see it was both a merchant sophistication issue and a market timing issue: IOT devices were still too new / expensive to have much draw. “We’ve had a lot of success in a short amount of time,” says Chris. “In the past few months alone we’ve had over 3,000 installations. With devices coming off the manufacturer assembly lines internet-enabled we only see upside in the Guard XT platform.”
COVID has only sped up all the ways consumers want to interact with local businesses… and it won’t end with COVID as consumers become accustomed to the convenience of new channels. Solutions that are flexible and keep up with market evolutions will be key for success. That looks a whole lot more like cloud POS than anything from 30 years ago.
Great perspective as usual. Let me add that installation costs for cloud POS are significantly lower than legacy POS. My company, HonorBuilt, has installed over a thousand locations for Revel and others and they are much easier and quicker than the old client/server platforms. That means lower costs and less downtime for the restaurant.
Don’t tell that to NCR
NCR is the company everyone loves to hate.
They do it to themselves. Nobody wants people to lose their jobs but NCR is making it hard for their employees to remain employed.