By Richard HEITMANN – International Sales Director – AURES UK
Charities and not-for-profit organisations use EPOS systems in all sorts of different ways. From big campaigning groups which operate charity shops all over the country to charitable trusts which run museums, galleries, national parks and other attractions, charitable bodies use EPOS for its full range of purposes, covering retail, hospitality, ticketing and more.
While some aspects of charity EPOS are unique – configuring systems to run the Gift Aid scheme, for example – generally speaking, not-for-profit organisations are looking for the same things everyone wants from a point of sale system. Reliability and performance are also high up on the list.
The purpose of running networked EPOS systems is to link multiple retail operations into a single, central platform, or integrate ticketing to your cafe and to your gift shop, is to deliver better control, greater visibility and higher efficiency. That can quickly unravel with system outages and component failures. A till system going down can cause inconvenience for your customers and lost sales. A network or software failure can spell huge trouble for your entire operation.
That is why no charity or not-for-profit can afford to overlook the importance of service and maintenance contracts for their EPOS systems. As organisations go through processes of digital transformation, maintaining systems has become a cornerstone of operational continuity. Whether it’s online or on your premises, any kind of outage these days usually means a loss of revenue.
So, what should charities and not-for-profit organisations look for in their service and maintenance contracts? At AURES, we believe in these three pillars:
Value
As EPOS solutions become increasingly sophisticated, their upkeep does require a certain amount of technical expertise. But no organisation should be held to ransom for that, and especially those in the charitable sector where operational costs eat into resources rather than profit margins. Our view at AURES is that if you have invested in our hardware, you have the right to have it running at optimum levels for as long as possible, without spending a fortune in after care costs. We customise service and maintenance contracts on a customer-by-customer basis and always aim to put together a preferential package that suits the needs of each charity/NFP organisation.
Vigilance
System maintenance works best when problems are anticipated and resolved before they even become an issue. If a till develops a fault, then everything becomes about minimising damage – some downtime, some disruption to service is inevitable. But if you are proactive about your service and maintenance schedules and confirm regular service dates then you can at least in theory, keep all systems up and running close to 100% of the time.
Rapid Response
Inevitably, things do go wrong and faults can occur. What you want then is a rapid, professional response to solve the issue. If you take the example of a charity shop where most of the staff are likely to be volunteers with varying degrees of technical know-how, even a simple till fault could cause lots of disruption. What organisations want in that situation is the peace of mind that, whatever the issue, it will be resolved as a priority. That is why at AURES we make speed a central part of our service and maintenance, supplied by a nationwide network of on-call engineers, helpline and replacement units delivered the next day if necessary.
For more information please contact us today.
01928 599 966
marketing-uk@advantech-aures.com