Chipmunks Playland and Café is a multinational indoor playground franchise with over 45 venues and over 250 staff members across New Zealand, Australia, and Indonesia. Chipmunks caters to children under 11 years of age and offers modern multi-story playground facilities with engaging and interactive equipment, birthday party rooms, and onsite cafés.
In 2019, we spoke to Chipmunks about their decision to choose ROLLER. Since then, the franchise has grown significantly, partly thanks to ROLLER’s all-in-one cloud-based indoor playground software. We talked to Jospher Nadar, IT Operations Specialist and resident ROLLER expert at Chipmunks, about how ROLLER has helped Chipmunks accelerate their revenue growth over the last five years.
When you’re running a huge business, you want something that is automated so you don’t have to worry about the small details. ROLLER reduces around 40% of the burden of managing party bookings.
Jospher Nadar
IT Operations Specialist, Chipmunks Playland and Café
Reducing party admin by 40%
In his role managing all of Chipmunks’ websites, systems, and IT, Jospher works closely with Chipmunks franchisees to ensure they’re getting the most out of ROLLER’s features and functionality. Feedback from the franchisees about ROLLER is overwhelmingly positive, especially regarding the ease of managing party bookings.
Before ROLLER, franchisees relied on manual website forms to take party booking requests. Jospher says this created unnecessary admin for guests and staff – “Guests used to fill out a form on the website, which is time-consuming.” Now, the party booking process is completely automated, reducing staff admin time for parties by around 40%. “When you’re running a huge business, you want something that is automated so you don’t have to worry about the small details. ROLLER reduces around 40% of the burden of managing party bookings,” says Jospher.
Leveraging ROLLER’s latest online booking functionality has also increased party revenue. When one of their locations upgraded to ROLLER’s new progressive checkouts, Chipmunks saw a record-breaking uptick in party bookings. Jospher states, “In two days, we received around 90-100 party bookings after switching to progressive checkout. That’s a massive number!”
In addition to this initial peak, franchisees are seeing a consistent increase in bookings week in and week out. “We’ve been getting a lot more party bookings,” says Jospher. “One of our stores has noticed an average of three to four more party bookings per week.” This has provided a significant incremental revenue stream for the business, and Chipmunks hopes to see this positive trend continue across other venues.
Chipmunks attributes this increase to higher online conversion rates and lower barriers to purchase with the progressive checkout. If a staff member is discussing a booking with a guest via phone, email, or social media, they can send a direct link to book that specific product in the checkout, rather than the guest having to click through multiple pages to find what they’re looking for. “You can directly link a customer to that product instead of the homepage. It’s quicker and easier,” says Jospher.
Streamlining food and beverage operations
ROLLER’s new production management feature has helped Chipmunks cut down on admin time even further. Production management is a cloud-based printer management solution that allows operators to easily send receipts and production dockets from the point of sale to designated printers. This ensures that food orders get to the kitchen as quickly as possible to avoid order delays for guests. With production management, operators can view printer error messages in POS to rectify printer issues immediately.
Jospher says that since trialing production management at one of the Chipmunks venues, they’re no longer experiencing frustrating printer errors that led to missing food orders and a poor guest experience. “Before production management, if I had a printer issue, it would take 45 minutes to fix,” says Jospher. He was regularly on the phone with franchisees trying to troubleshoot failed print jobs, taking up valuable time that franchisees really can’t afford to lose at a busy venue with guests to attend to.
Since trialing production management, Chipmunks Loganholme has had no printer issues. “It’s been two and a half months, and there hasn’t been a single call. I look forward to having it in our other stores. It saves my time and franchisees’ time as well,” says Jospher.
Jospher loves the convenience of managing printers from the ROLLER platform. “Printer management is native in ROLLER now, so I don’t have to go and look at other apps. I can just log into ROLLER, have a quick look, and change the settings,” states Jospher.
Decreasing venue set-up time by 35% with HQ
Jospher manages all Chipmunks venues from a single HQ account to save time making changes across all locations individually.
HQ has been tremendous. Any changes that I do, any pricing updates, I can do from HQ. It’s just easy – one change across the board, that’s all it takes.
Jospher Nadar
IT Operations Specialist, Chipmunks Playland and Café
Without centralized venue management, price point and product inconsistencies can occur across franchise locations, creating confusion for guests visiting multiple locations and reducing brand consistency. “It takes away from the standard Chimpmunks offering,” states Jospher. “With HQ, it’s easier to keep the brand consistent.” This also frees up franchisees to focus on growing their business. “The best part about this is that it takes off admin work for franchisees,” says Jospher.
However, franchisees still have the flexibility to test out what works best for their particular audience and location. “We've created a couple of products for them to have freedom with so that they can try out new menus. It’s been really good,” says Jospher.
HQ will be more important than ever in the next 18-24 months, with Chipmunks set to open another nine venues across Australia and New Zealand. When they open a new venue, Jospher estimates that the set-up process is around 35% faster with HQ. “I would say set-up time has reduced by an hour and a half,” says Jospher. “We can just deploy all the product changes, and that’s it.” There are many competing priorities to consider when opening a new venue, so not worrying about product set-up alleviates some of the pressure for operators.
When asked if he had any advice for other multi-venue operators looking for a software platform to help them grow, Jospher’s answer was simple. “Look for software that makes your and your franchisees' life easier so that they can focus on the important stuff that has to be done on the ground. ROLLER is exactly that software.”
To find out how ROLLER can help you scale and expand, get a demo today.
