UPshow Announces Acquisition by EverPass Media and Strategic Spinoff of Employee Experience Platform — Click to Read More
There are three undeniable changes that have/will impact the retail health marketplace:
This tidal wave of changes offers a unique opportunity for retailers with health offerings in-store to succeed. Executives who evaluate this consumer behavior for their retail health clinics can use the changes above to transform consumers into repeat customers and increase customer loyalty by pathing them into your Care+Commerce Ecosystem.
The Care+Commerce Ecosystem resembles other buying ecosystems and consists of three related points of entry:
Savvy retail health clinics use this ecosystem to increase customer loyalty by creating a behavioral loop where each step in the ecosystem leads to another. Consumers transform into loyal and engaged customers from any of these three starting points.
Let’s take a look at how this ecosystem behaves at each point of entry.
Many retail health clinics want to acquire new customers from the store’s pool of retail shoppers. Currently a customer enters the retail location, and discovers the retail health clinic by chance. Leading retailers do not leave this experience up to chance. Instead, they use digital signage in their stores to waypath their customers into the Care+Commerce Ecosystem. Digital signage moves customers through the store through flexible and impactful methods.
For example, a customer enters your store intending to purchase a greeting card. While there, they see a screen letting them know they can earn bonuses through your store’s app when they refill a prescription. This messaging both reminds customers they need to refill a prescription and gives them an extra incentive to download the app. They’re already in-store for one purchase. You lower the barrier to switch their prescription to your retail health clinic’s pharmacy by offering specific messages with an easy to use QR code.
While at the pharmacy, this same customer sees a screen highlighting the retail health clinic’s physical therapy offering. Again, using a custom QR code that promotes immediate action, the customer schedules an appointment on the spot.
Targeted messaging on specific screens turns a retail customer into a repeat customer at your retail health clinic. Not only that, but now the customer has downloaded your app, opening another avenue of marketing.
The next time this customer arrives at your store, they will enter the Care+Commerce Ecosystem at the point of care and move through the ecosystem to the pharmacy and, with the right digital signage, make additional purchases on their way out. Moving customers through the Care+Commerce Ecosystem is a seamless method of increasing customer loyalty and turning one-time shoppers into repeat customers.
Some customers begin their journey through the Care+Commerce Ecosystem at the point of care stage. These customers use retail health clinics to address their care needs, from optometry to annual physicals. A strong digital signage strategy moves these customers through your venue after their appointment.
For example, a retail health clinic offers optometry services. The appointment with your retail health clinic’s ophthalmologist offers a large convenience to consumers: after the customer’s appointment, they shop while waiting for their prescriptions at your pharmacy.
Use digital signage to drive customers to sales, promotions and other special offers. Many customers will choose to wait for their prescriptions, giving you access to additional mindshare while they stay in your store.
When the customer purchases their food plus prescription at the pharmacy, a final screen reminds them to schedule a followup appointment. This followup reminder is the critical point in this iteration of the Care+Commerce Ecosystem. A followup appointment guarantees a repeat customer for you. This continuous activity loop allows you to change customer behavior, build trust with the customer and ultimately increase customer loyalty at your retail health clinic and larger retail location.
The final point of entry into the Care+Commerce Ecosystem is a pharmacy lead. For many retail locations with retail health clinics, these leads will be the most common as consumers consolidate shopping behaviors and minimize time spent in-venue.
A study from the University of Pennsylvania proved out the common belief that most in-store purchases are impulse purchases. In fact, according to the study, 74% of all purchase decisions in mass merchandisers are impulse purchases. So, the longer a customer stays in store the more opportunities to purchase from you; this is not a new concept. What might be new is thinking about how to keep them longer when a customer enters your retail health clinic to pick up a prescription from the pharmacy.
For example, many customers at a pharmacy purchase maintenance medication, so be strategic with your offers. Guide customers to items that meet their needs, like tissues for those with colds, aspirin for those with high blood pressure or sterile wipes and cotton balls for diabetics or those who require regular injections.
While they wait for their prescription, use screens to promote your retail health clinic’s availability. Many retail health clinics offer appointments outside of regular business hours, allowing customers greater freedom to receive flu shots, annual physicals and preventive care consultations. Many customers don’t engage with these offerings because they are unaware of them.
These combined messages help change consumer behavior and transform one-time buyers into repeat customers.
The Care+Commerce Ecosystem offers retailers with retail health clinics powerful new options to engage customers within their business. If you’re ready to leverage digital signage to transform customer behavior and increase customer loyalty, UPshow is ready to help.
In the recent Zenput/Technomic 2020 Restaurant Ops Report, 44% of those surveyed reported employee turnover in their restaurants as one of their main barriers to high performance and customer satisfaction. Employee turnover impacts the restaurant industry even more critically, as restaurants are notorious for operating on razor thin margins. Employee turnover doesn’t only affect the bottom line but also the quality of your entire operation.
To engage your employees and retain your workforce, you need to deliver top-notch internal communications, provide regular recognition of talented employees, and demonstrate an investment in the wellbeing of the greater community. With UPshow’s Back of House software, in conjunction with employees’ mobile devices, you materially reduce restaurant employee turnover.
Communication is key to restaurant employee engagement and preventing employee turnover. Among shift workers, the ability to trade and pick up shifts is key in their autonomy and satisfaction at work. Conversely, difficulty in managing their schedule can lead to dissatisfaction and increased employee turnover in the restaurant industry.For example, the Society for Human Resource Management reports that 83% of hourly workers would stay in their job if they had more transparency around and control over their schedule, emphasizing shift predictability and flexibility.
UPshow’s Back of House software provides clear and regular updates regarding expectations, opportunities and benefits. Restaurants that display shift availability as well as culture/benefits updates create a better employee experience. Further, through QR codes and the subsequent additional connections with employee’s mobile devices, you give employees even more of the control they seek.
Employees stay where their efforts are appreciated and rewarded. In fact, HR Technologist reports that 69% of employees would consider staying at a company that improved its recognition and rewards programs. Whether it is highlighting an employee of the month, or celebrating those who clock-in consistently on time, recognition becomes a driver of restaurant employee engagement and lower employee turnover.
UPshow’s Back of House software visibly celebrates employee achievements and milestones in a way that improves restaurant employee engagement, morale and team spirit. With integration into your time and attendance systems, information can be displayed on screen the moment it’s earned. Those who have clocked-in to work on time for five days in a row are called out on screen the minute it happens, when a super-star earns “Employee of the Month” that message can rotate on the screens every 10 minutes, and birthdays are always displayed without any need for managers to input additional information.
One of the top factors in restaurant employee engagement is fostering a sense of pride in being an employee at your restaurant. As members of the larger community, employees appreciate aligning the company’s social outreach initiatives with projects and organizations that improve their local community.
UPshow’s Back of House software highlights philanthropic and community efforts to bolster staff pride in your restaurant, while additionally empowering employees to engage and provide their own input on social responsibility initiatives.
See how UPshow’s Back of House software can increase your employee retention:
Please fill out the form below to talk to an UPshow representative. After submitting, you can select a time that works best for you to meet with our team.
“Only 34% of restaurant operators are very confident in their ability to identify potential food safety concerns before they become an issue.” -Zenput/Technomic 2020 Restaurant Ops Report
Food safety is a chief concern for all restaurant owners and managers. Being slow or unable to address food safety issues harms a restaurant’s reputation, damages the customer base and leads to long-term negative effects on profitability. Unfortunately, many restaurant owners aren’t versed in the new ways to manage a food safety occurrence, such as better, more reliable dissemination of training to prevent food safety issues.
According to Zenput’s 2020 Restaurant Ops Report, restaurant owners’ confidence in their ability to address food safety issues is actually declining. Per the report, “[in] a Fall 2018 survey, 50 percent indicated they were very confident in their ability to identify food safety issues…” as opposed to the 34% in the current 2020 study.
Failing to adhere to food safety guidelines not only damages a restaurant’s reputation and customer base but can also result in hefty fines. So how can restaurant owners address food safety issues in a timely manner and ensure staff adhere to food safety guidelines? A multi-faceted approach works best: Leverage employee engagement through shift acquisition to ensure sick employees remain home, train employees and keep them up-to-date on current food safety guidelines and use operational best-practices to keep facilities clean.
These three initiatives don’t have to overwhelm managers. UPshow’s new Back of House software provides simple ways to achieve these goals while delivering measurable feedback to managers at venues of all sizes.
Many restaurant employees can’t afford to miss shifts due to illness and come into work regardless of symptoms and the food safety guidelines. Their commitment to their job can easily result in a food safety issue. In the current environment, a sick employee poses an even greater risk for restaurants. Luckily, there’s a solution: UPshow’s Back of House software makes it easy for healthy employees to claim shifts from sick employees and for sick employees to claim additional shifts once they’ve recovered.
Managers can encourage employees to stay home in the present by being transparent about available shifts in the future. An employee who knows they will have plenty of opportunity to make up missed shifts is far more likely to stay home and recover, minimizing your restaurant’s risk of contaminating food and violating food safety guidelines.
With 36% of restaurant owners reporting that it takes them more than a week to address food safety issues, per Zenput/Technomic’s 2020 Restaurant Ops Report, access to training on these issues becomes critical. A well-trained staff can address food safety issues as they arise and resolve them before they become a concern.
UPshow’s Back of House software makes it easy for managers to communicate about new training courses to employees. With COVID-19 forcing rapid changes in food safety practices and guidelines, managers need this simplified way to engage employees in training.
With the status tracking display, managers are able to see who has and hasn’t completed critical new training programs around food safety guidelines. Plus, status tracking displays encourage a spirit of competition between employees and provide immediate, tangible feedback.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), restaurant staff failing to adhere to proper food safety procedures is a leading cause of foodborne illness.
Tracking operational metrics around facility cleanliness helps mitigate food safety issues, keeps your customers happy and healthy and lowers the risk of fines. UPshow’s Back of House software makes staying on top of health and safety goals simple and easy for all staff.
Utilizing UPshow’s Back of House software enables restaurants to adhere more easily food safety guidelines.
Please fill out the form below to talk to an UPshow representative. After submitting, you can select a time that works best for you to meet with our team.
Driving sales volume and cutting costs to increase margins are the hallmarks of good restaurant operations. Creating strong restaurant operations requires faster and more widespread communication than the average manager can achieve on a daily basis. Consequently, employees lack clarity about operational goals or receive them too late. The results are inconsistency, slow service and an overall lack of operational efficiency in restaurants.
UPshow’s Back of House software contributes to operational efficiency in restaurants by communicating key indicators like speed of service, customer satisfaction, restaurant cleanliness and sales volume in real time. As a result, staff can react quickly and make a material impact on customer experience and bottom line.
Front of house success is wholly dependent on back of house consistency. When the kitchen prepares food consistently and servers are aware of menu changes or item availability, the speed of service increases, customer expectations are met and overall operational efficiency improves.
UPshow’s Back of House software allows for rapid and effective communication of key updates like new menu items, restaurant procedures and food preparation processes.
Having menu and preparation updates readily available supports cooks in making dishes consistently, keeps servers informed on item availability and saves time as fewer items are sent back to the kitchen. As a result, the Back of House software messages create real operational efficiency in restaurants that reduce cost and increase profit margins. Learn More
How frequently restaurants turn tables directly impacts sales volume. Improving the speed of service in restaurants increases that turnover metric as well as overall customer satisfaction and the bottom line.
In fact, 51% of diners surveyed by Consumer Reports listed slow service as one of their top complaints at restaurants.
UPshow’s Back of House software updates staff on KPIs like speed of service and other customer satisfaction metrics in real-time to deliver operational efficiency in restaurants. Learn More
Maintaining a high level of quality and cleanliness is critical for growing restaurants, especially when a single social media post can cause acute damage to a restaurant’s reputation. In the recent Zenput/Technomic 2020 Restaurant Ops Report, less than 1 in 4 establishments reported being able to correct potential food safety concerns within 48 hours or less.
Keep staff informed and trained so they can resolve issues immediately or even prevent them before they happen. UPshow’s Back of House software regularly communicates the status of facility cleanliness and adherence to safety standards.
Recommended Resources
Digital Signage and 6 Other Creative Ways to Communicate Information to Employees
3 Ways Good Entertainment Improves Your Customer Experience
A Step-by-Step Guide to Designing TV Menu Boards For Your Restaurant
UPshow has once again been included in the upper tier of the annual Inc. 5000 list of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies.
Reprising our spot among many rapidly-growing brands in the upper echelon of the Inc. 5000 is an incredible honor and a fantastic indicator of how far we’ve come.
Previous Inc 5000 honorees include Intuit, Zappos, Under Armour, Microsoft, Patagonia, and many other well-known companies.
Check out Inc.’s full list here.
“Engaged employees have 65% less turnover and are 22% more productive.” - Harvard Business Review
In the restaurant industry, your ability to implement highly visible leaderboards on in-venue TVs provides real-time sales performance data. This information directly results in optimal employee productivity and increased sales in your venue.
So, what do you do if you don’t have this capability? Or your current capability is sub-par? UPshow’s Back of House software combines information + gamification + repetition to maximize individual and team performance and drive revenue. Learn more below:
Individual performance is driven by data and the ability to react appropriately. In most restaurants the problem is NOT the lack of information, but the ability to surface it correctly. Between POS systems, corporate data and manager feedback, there is a wealth of content living just outside the reach of employees who could use this data to support their sales efforts.
UPshow’s Back of House software displays real-time data updates for sales and item availability.
Having accessible sales data as it happens, rather than hours or days later, supports servers and cashiers in optimizing their productivity and selling more. By displaying information like the number of specials sold, or the success of high-margin items, your employees are more informed and more likely to hit or exceed the goals you set. Learn More
Gamification is an incredibly powerful tool to improve restaurant employee engagement. A study from Deloitte (2017), The power of employee engagement: redefining the restaurant experience shows that fostering a fun, positive work environment is key to reducing average restaurant employee turnover.
UPshow’s Back of House leaderboards securely integrate with your point-of-sale system to display real-time staff and team sales performance with frequent updates. These updates generate an environment of gamification that improves employee engagement by creating friendly competition. UPshow’s Back of House software drives employees to maximize individual performance, subsequently unifying and motivating the entire team to surpass sales targets. Learn More
Training employees quickly and consistently is challenging, especially as a business scales to multiple locations and franchises.In the recent Zenput/Technomic 2020 Restaurant Ops Report, 39% of businesses claimed that poor training is their biggest barrier to success.
Proper training is only as good as your ability to disseminate and reinforce information. Studies show that you must communicate a message seven separate times in order for it to stick. UPshow’s Back of House software allows companies to do this on an enterprise level by pushing training information to in-venue TVs in seconds, even allowing segmentation by location as necessary.
As messaging appears, interactive codes give restaurant employees the option to ask questions or engage further with a quick scan from their smartphone.
See how UPshow’s Back of House software can optimize employee productivity and increase sales.
The UPshow Back of House engagement platform is the most effective way to communicate with your employees, enabling them to consume and respond to real-time information via in-venue TV screens and their mobile devices. The UPshow system is proven to boost employee productivity, create operational excellence, increase employee retention and improve the employee training experience.
Get Started with Back of House
“Engaged employees have 65% less turnover and are 22% more productive.” -Harvard Business Review
Highly visible leaderboards, displayed on in-venue TVs, display real-time staff and team sales performance. This encourages a spirit of competition which drives employees to maximize individual and team performance, ultimately resulting in optimal productivity and sales in your venue.
Get Started with Back of House
Too often, employees lack key metrics about restaurant performance against operational goals or they receive them too late. To operate at your best, you need to communicate KPIs (e.g., speed of service, customer satisfaction, restaurant cleanliness and sales volumes) in real time, so your staff can react quickly and make a material difference to your customer experience and bottom line. UPshow’s Back of House software helps your restaurant meet:
Get Started with Back-of-House
“The number one reason employees lack engagement is poor communication.” – Ragan Communications
Engaged employees are much more likely to stay at their jobs. To engage and retain your workforce, you need to deliver top notch internal communications and provide regular recognition of talented employees. With UPshow’s Back of House TV screens, alongside employee mobile devices, you can materially boost employee retention.
Get Started with Back of House
“The restaurant industry has lost and will need to replace two-thirds of its workforce.” –QSR Magazine
The speed and effectiveness of employee training is a major contributor to delivering great guest experiences and improving food quality, employee productivity, and restaurant profitability. UPshow’s Back of House platform enables employees to rapidly learn about and easily access training courses and certification tests via TV screens, with the content delivered via mobile SMS (text) or email.
The UPshow Back of House engagement platform is the most effective way to communicate with your employees, enabling them to consume and respond to real-time information via in-venue TV screens and their mobile devices. The UPshow system is proven to boost employee productivity, create operational excellence, increase employee retention and improve the employee training experience.
Get Started with Back of House
“Engaged employees have 65% less turnover and are 22% more productive.” -Harvard Business Review
Highly visible leaderboards, displayed on in-venue TVs, display real-time staff and team sales performance. This encourages a spirit of competition which drives employees to maximize individual and team performance, ultimately resulting in optimal productivity and sales in your venue.
Get Started with Back of House
Too often, employees lack key metrics about restaurant performance against operational goals or they receive them too late. To operate at your best, you need to communicate KPIs (e.g., speed of service, customer satisfaction, restaurant cleanliness and sales volumes) in real time, so your staff can react quickly and make a material difference to your customer experience and bottom line. UPshow’s Back of House software helps your restaurant meet:
Get Started with Back-of-House
“The number one reason employees lack engagement is poor communication.” - Ragan Communications
Engaged employees are much more likely to stay at their jobs. To engage and retain your workforce, you need to deliver top notch internal communications and provide regular recognition of talented employees. With UPshow’s Back of House TV screens, alongside employee mobile devices, you can materially boost employee retention.
Get Started with Back of House
“The restaurant industry has lost and will need to replace two-thirds of its workforce.” -QSR Magazine
The speed and effectiveness of employee training is a major contributor to delivering great guest experiences and improving food quality, employee productivity, and restaurant profitability. UPshow’s Back of House platform enables employees to rapidly learn about and easily access training courses and certification tests via TV screens, with the content delivered via mobile SMS (text) or email.
Re-opening amid a pandemic is both exciting and daunting. There’s no doubt your loyal customers are excited to come back to your restaurant; however, fear is a powerful obstacle. Choosing to visit your establishment is no longer simply about whether yours is a place they want to eat - but whether the excursion is worth the risk. And all of the work you’ve done and steps you’ve taken to mitigate the risk of COVID-19 and guarantee restaurant safety are only worthwhile if your customers absorb the messaging.
The commonly accepted “Rule of 7” indicates that it takes 7 different touchpoints for a message to be accepted by its recipient. Making your customers feel comfortable means communicating with them over multiple channels, and multiple times. As a result, the number one priority for your venue is to establish your contactless communication protocols, and a close second is to make sure you are leveraging this communication regularly, and through a variety of channels.
Here are the crucial factors to consider when communicating coronavirus safety messaging to your restaurant customers in coming months:
1. Be Transparent, Succinct and Give Options to Learn More
As you craft your messaging, prioritize being honest and upfront. Customers seek authenticity, so cutting corners or glossing over communication can damage their trust in your brand.
The best way to communicate clearly is to assume your customers know nothing about your coronavirus safety practices. Explain each of the steps you are taking to ensure their safety, and that of your staff. This includes staff protocols behind the scenes (i.e., in the kitchens, after closing, and during delivery).
For example, let’s say you share a message letting customers know you sanitize tables regularly throughout the day. This phrasing leaves a lot of questions: How often is regularly? Has the table been sanitized between my visit and the previous customer? What about the chairs? In this case, a more effective message could be, “We sanitize each dining area completely between uses.” When in doubt, put yourself in the shoes of your guests, to predict the questions you would have before and during your visit.
When sharing communication, work on creating short punchy information, with opportunities to read more fulsome materials in other places. Make it easier for guests to jump to these secondary destinations using tools like vanity URLs or QR codes. QR codes are a frictionless, contactless way to deliver users directly to an online destination, using only a quick scan from their phone camera. If your marketing software includes a QR generator in their features, you’ll be able to track campaign results in the backend, which can be helpful when optimizing your strategy.
2. Use all Your Channels
Remember the Rule of 7. For customers to understand coronavirus safety messaging you need to tell them frequently and across a variety of channels.
PRE VISIT
Send out your communications via email, social media, and even text message. Don’t wait for customers to seek out the answers to their questions - instead, deliver the information directly; include new business hours, safety policies, and express the value you place on their health. You may even want to leverage the power of local influencers and host a soft restaurant re-opening, inviting them to post about the safety and quality of the dining experience.
IN VENUE
Digital signage is a fantastic, contactless tool to share these communications in-venue, as it’s easy to update and can show multiple messages in a number of minutes. If your signage allows for mobile interactivity, even better. You can leverage this technology to give your customers touch-free access to information they would typically get through physical materials or interaction with staff.
POST VISIT
Even when customers leave the restaurant, continue utilizing contactless communication to maintain trust and stay top of mind. Send promotions via text message and loyalty app push notifications to keep customers coming back - or ordering delivery when they’d rather stay home.
3. Show As Well As Tell
Of course, coronavirus safety messaging only works if you follow through in-venue. The proof is in your actions, and customers are paying attention.
Be proactive and provide hand sanitizer throughout the restaurant. If accessible, have disposable face coverings on hand to offer to customers who may have forgotten theirs. Wipe down takeout containers and other items in front of the customer, so they can feel confident in its cleanliness. This is another place where digital tools can be helpful -- eliminating high-touch food menus, dessert options, and wine lists and replacing them with more contactless communication, like QR code accessible versions.
This behavior also applies to employees in the back of house, especially those who will frequently interact with visitors. Buy the staff face masks that fit, and train them to wear it correctly, over their nose and mouth. When taking photos for social media, be sure to keep masks on as well - it may feel odd, but it’s the best practice for showing customers you care.
Digital tech is a great tool to promote these practices and educate your staff. Your managers can easily push coronavirus safety messaging, generalized announcements, and new protocols by leveraging your back-of-house screens. Further, staff can take advantage of mobile interactivity on digital screens to interact with training sessions and HR news via their mobile devices. This strategy allows you to regularly update your team on important news, without interrupting their productivity with meetings or emails.
These are unprecedented times. It can be hard to know what to do, or how much. There is no handbook for perfection - just treat your staff and customers like family, and do what you can to educate and protect them.
We’ve made improvements to our social content tool! These updates will make social posts appear more quickly, frequently, and reliably on screen.
In order to take advantage of these improvements and prevent an interruption in social content, you will need to connect your Instagram Business account to UPshow.
Follow these simple steps to get started:
To create a business account, you'll need to have an existing personal Instagram account. If you don’t have an Instagram account, you can create one here.
To switch your account to a business account:
This is a great tutorial on how to make an Instagram Business account.
2. If this prompt does not show, click the + icon in the top right corner of the page
3. Once you select this option, you will see a pop-up from Facebook (parent company of Instagram), which will walk you through the process.
Need more help? Let us know at support@upshow.tv
As our CEO Adam Hirsen wrote about earlier this week, we are working to enable our clients with immediate solutions to help as the COVID-19 situation develops. Below we outline ways to use your in-venue screen to support your business in new ways.
Many of our partners, whose locations are still fully or partially operational, are repositioning their UPshow screens to be window-facing. This allows for key messaging to be dynamically displayed, updated and viewed from outside.
This can be done by:
Rather than a piece of paper taped to the window (which quickly becomes outdated), these screens serve as dynamic outdoor-facing digital message boards that you can control from anywhere. Placing near an entrance, drive-thru or anywhere with high visibility allows your most current and important messages to reach your customers.
If you’re unable to move your TV, another solution is running your UPshow screen from a computer or tablet. We are offering all of our customers a web page version of your screen for this purpose. Please contact support@upshow.tv if you would like a web page version of your UPshow screen.
The UPshow team has created spotlight templates for you to easily upload to your account. Based on popular demand, our partners are looking to promote:
If you’d like to receive these spotlights, please contact support@upshow.tv
In order to maximize screen time on spotlights, many partners have requested to only showcase Spotlights during this time.
If you’d like to make this change, please contact support@upshow.tv
Remember, you can manage your spotlights (and entire account) from the safety of your own home.
If you have questions on how to implement any of these short term initiatives, please do not hesitate to contact us at support@upshow.tv or via phone at (855) 787-7469.
