This month has to be our most exciting release yet! With 40% of our customer’s sales online and massive year-on-year increases, it’s the perfect time to release our brand-new progressive checkout experience!
Brimming with features like improved booking flows, up-sells, party packages, and more, it delivers higher conversion rates and transaction values to grow your online revenue.
Check out all the latest on our new progressive checkout, plus a number of other enhancements to save you time, improve reliability, and deliver seamless guest experiences!
We hope you enjoy this video demonstrating the latest ROLLER updates.
This release includes:
- Our latest features:
- Progressive Checkouts
- Party Packages
- Staff Performance, Monthly Performance, and Additional Questions features related to the Guest Experience Score (GX Score)
- GX Score API
- Booking Agreements
- Payment Requests/ Links
- HQ upgrades
- Details on our upcoming App Marketplace
- Our new Payments Dashboard
- Reporting upgrades
- Information on our latest Printer Management functionality
Progressive Checkouts are now live!
Selling is likely, always top of mind for you, so it should be!
Increasing your sales has been one of our biggest focuses this year, and we have some sensational new features to help you take your selling to the next level – by increasing your online conversion rate and streamlining your guest experience.
So let’s start with Progressive Checkouts! The growth of online commerce in leisure and attraction businesses continues to accelerate. And guests reward brands that provide frictionless, self-service experiences with their wallets and loyalty.
We introduced our new Progressive Checkout app in our last broadcast, and today, we’re excited to announce that Progressive Checkouts are live for ALL customers!
Progressive Checkouts feature recap
- With mobile devices accounting for over 70% of online sales, we designed and architected Progressive Checkouts for mobile devices to optimize conversion rates and provide users with beautiful experiences.
- The new home page enables you to curate a visual feed of experiences, carousels, and calls to action that can link to external pages.
- The Progressive Checkout experience is engaging and immersive. It provides guests with a rich experience that visually communicates your brand and generates excitement for your experiences.
- With a focus on conversion, the add-to-cart experience has been enhanced to create fast and elegant interactions that visually assure the guest of the action and the next step to proceed toward completion.
- The order summary is now a constant UI element that enables immediate viewing and editing of the cart’s contents and reassures guests as they proceed through the checkout experience.
- We’ve optimized local device storage to automatically complete those annoying, repetitive, but necessary fields required for you to identify guests and bookings.
- We’ve harnessed the power of ROLLER Payments to eliminate friction from the payment process and boost conversion. Progressive Checkouts seamlessly support mobile wallets, browser-stored cards, Buy Now Pay Later, and alternative payment methods.
- To publish and share your checkout more efficiently, we’ve created a great new overlay experience. It's a vast improvement that eliminates scrolling and displays as the user navigates the pages of your website. Your web developer easily implements the overlay experience, and it opens up new possibilities for you to create your detailed product pages.
- You can now implement your add-to-cart button on your website to open the Progressive Checkout to the specific product page.
- Progressive Checkouts natively supports Google Analytics 4, the Meta, and TikTok pixels.
- You can publish your Progressive Checkout via your custom domain. Custom domains increase conversion by improving user trust. They also enhance the effectiveness and conversion rate of digital advertising platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Progressive Checkouts performance data
Since the last broadcast, we’ve been testing Progressive Checkouts with various customers and attraction types. We’ve been monitoring data, watching session recordings, and implementing enhancements like the new add-to-cart animation.
Let’s compare two of our customer venues from the same brand, located approximately 100 miles apart. We found that the conversion rates were almost identical until August, when Venue 2 implemented Progressive Checkouts, while Venue 1 continued to use legacy checkouts. The conversion rate of Venue 2 using Progressive Checkouts has improved massively — increasing by almost 10 percent!
From a technical point of view, we’ve built Progressive Checkouts for performance and scalability. These benchmarks demonstrate that Progressive Checkouts lead the industry for speed, accessibility, best practices, and user experience.
These are excellent results, and the good news is that Progressive Checkouts are available for you to implement TODAY. Improve your eCommerce experience and results ahead of the busy holiday season by heading to our Help Center. We’ve created easy-to-follow articles and videos to help to prepare, configure and publish your Progressive Checkout experience.
Please note: You need to be using ROLLER Payments to use Progressive Checkouts. If you're not currently using ROLLER Payments, we’ve made it super simple to convert and encourage you to connect with our support team or an account manager to learn more about how ROLLER Payments can save you time and improve your business.
Upcoming new features
Online Accounts
Online Accounts enable Guests to access, redeem and manage their bookings, memberships, gift cards, payment methods, and personal details via the Progressive checkout.
We’ve made the Sign-up process for accounts simple and secure using One Time Passwords that are sent to the guest via text message or email. One Time Passwords eliminate the need to remember passwords and protect against identity theft. It also improves your marketing database by validating deliverability to guests' cell numbers and email addresses.
We’re also supporting Single Sign On providers, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, to securely reduce the friction of creating accounts. Once a guest is signed into their Online account, we have a great opportunity to optimize their experience, and we’re starting with Memberships.
Phase one is scheduled to deploy to beta in early December and will allow Members to:
- View their benefits and access their membership barcodes for rapid redemption in-venue
- Create new bookings online and automatically redeem their membership benefits without having to remember and enter their unique discount codes
- Cancel memberships, with venues able to configure automated or manual processing while enforcing minimum contract terms
- Manage payment methods and overdue amounts
With this framework in place to allow guests to create and access accounts, we’re planning to progressively add more experiences that provide guests with greater convenience and save you time.
Online food and beverage ordering
Guests will have the opportunity to order food and beverage by scanning a QR code, ordering, and paying online.
We hope food and beverage ordering will be available for beta late this year, so keep an eye out for invitations to the beta program.
New product alert: Party Packages
Parties are a significant driver of revenue for most venues. They contribute approximately 21% of all revenue ROLLER processes. But selling and facilitating parties requires a lot of time and management.
We created the party packages product to save you time by making the process of booking parties super simple for guests and staff.
The new way to book
Guests select a party experience, a session time, and how many guests are attending. The party package product will dynamically calculate the number of party inclusions from the number of guests attending.
For example, one pizza feeds approximately five guests, so if you select 15 attendees, the package will automatically add three pizzas.
Guests are then prompted to select their food, drink, or merchandise preferences using stock variations as they purchase — eliminating the need for unintuitive forms or manually adding items to party bookings.
The process is seamless, allowing guests to book their personalized party experience and giving them confidence that their special day will be stress-free!
Choose your inclusions
When managing these bookings in Venue Manager, you can easily update the party inclusions or guest count, making managing last-minute changes a breeze.
We’ve created this new product type for party packages because they’re generally complex. We want you to be able to define a cost per participant and allow the platform to calculate and capture the variety of inclusions dynamically.
You can add inclusions and configure rules that will define how inclusions are added or removed from the package as the number of guests changes.
Buffer time
You can also configure resource allocation and add buffer time to accommodate for cleaning between parties. With per-session booking limits, this allows you to automate party scheduling.
Party packages save you valuable time that would otherwise have been spent manually managing bookings and will help you deliver a superior guest experience.
We have high hopes for this product type as it is just the starting point for ROLLER to assist venues and party hosts in better managing and executing these special events.
Party Packages are in beta and will be available soon for all subscription plans. Please contact your account manager or support if you’re interested in getting early access and participating in the beta.
Serving guests
Delivering exceptional guest service is the greatest driver of guest satisfaction. It will motivate them to return (and refer your venue to their friends), ultimately increasing revenue and profit.
To assist your venue in doing this to the best of your ability, let’s go through some enhancements we’ve made to help you better serve your guests through the Guest Experience Score solution.
The Guest Experience Score
Guests talk about their experiences when they’re exceptional, but it’s not always easy to know exactly what makes an experience unforgettable.
To make it simpler to action guest feedback, improve your experience, and create raving fans, we’ve added a host of new features to the Guest Experience Score.
Staff performance insights
We’ve added a Staff Performance insights visualization that lets you monitor the service staff provide in group or party bookings.
Party and group bookings are a significant driver of revenue and new guests, contributing around 30 to 40% of income for many venues. We see a strong correlation between staff service and guest satisfaction, so we want to make it as easy as possible for you to see exactly how your party hosts are performing and be confident that guests are receiving exceptional service from staff.
ROLLER allows you to assign a host to any booking. When you assign a booking host, the guest feedback will automatically be connected and graphically presented in the Guest Insights Dashboard.
With staff performance insights, you can compare performance, view each staff member's average score, and any comments guests have provided about these bookings. You’ll have a clear view of how your staff perform and any areas you may need to improve to deliver a consistent and exceptional experience for your party bookings.
This free feature is available to all customers using the guest experience score.
Monthly performance report
We know it's hard to find enough time to review all guest feedback, so we’ve done all the hard work for you and created a new monthly performance report.
Starting this month, you’ll receive a monthly performance summary, and at a glance, you’ll be able to view the following:
- Your overall responses and performance grouped by day of the week
- The average response for each rating factor and how this month's performance compares with last month
- A snapshot of what’s working well and areas that might require improvement
- Which of your staff and experiences are garnering the best sentiment score
- Reviews that have been shared on public review sites like Facebook, Google, TripAdvisor, and Yelp
- How well you're responding to critics
The report highlights opportunities and is a great way to share feedback with the rest of your team in a digestible and actionable way.
If you are subscribed to the Guest Experience Score, the monthly performance report will be sent to you automatically.
Additional questions
You can now add additional questions to your GX Score survey. Customers have told us that they want to utilize the Guest Experience Score to ask guests other questions, such as:
- How guests heard about their venue
- Guests’ thoughts on a specific area or part of the experience
- How frequently do guests visit similar venues
So with the additional questions feature, you’ll spend less time juggling multiple tools and connecting data and more time making improvements to your guest experience.
The feature is available to customers on paid Lite or Pro GX Score subscriptions. Customers on Pro can activate multiple questions, and ROLLER will randomly select one to ask each guest, ensuring we maintain the survey’s high completion rates.
HQ feature
If you’re using our HQ feature to manage multiple venues, we’ve made monitoring performance even easier via HQ.
You can now view the venue activity for every one of your multiple venues on a single page! You’ll be able to view the guest experience score of each venue, individual rating factor performance, and whether any critical guests need following up.
With this new enhancement to the HQ feature, head office staff and area managers can more easily keep a finger on the pulse and gain a more holistic view of how the network of venues is performing.
To utilize this feature, activate the GX Score in Venue Manager and login into your HQ account.
Marketing with the GX Score
At ROLLER, we’re working to arm you with the tools and channels you need to market your business better, discover new audiences, and personalize interactions to help you grow your brand and increase sales.
API access to guest sentiment data
Delivering the right message, to the right audience, at the right time is a critical part of successful marketing campaigns, but personalizing your marketing campaigns can often fall into the “too hard” basket. All too often, guest data is living in different systems or is incomplete and outdated.
To increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, we’ve made guest sentiment data collected by the Guest Experience Score available via our API. You can now segment your audience by guest sentiment and send guests relevant offers based on their feedback.
For example, you may wish to promote membership upsells to happy guests that provided feedback with a Guest Experience Score of four or five or re-engage unhappy guests that provided you with a score of one or two with special offers.
API access to guest sentiment data allows you to utilize your guest response data any way you see fit – for marketing, business intelligence dashboards, or personalized experiences tailored to the guest's recent sentiment.
You’ll need to use our data APIs to access this. To find out more, visit docs.roller.app, contact your account manager or support.
If you are not yet using the GX Score, you can use it for free, and your first 30 days will include access to all features, including additional questions.
Upcoming: App Marketplace
There are millions of apps built to help businesses, and we know that many of you use apps like:
- Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, and Klavio for email marketing and automation
- Quickbooks, Xero, MYOB, and Exact Online for financial management, and
- Netsuite, Salesforce, and SAP enterprise for resource planning solutions.
To enable you to connect ROLLER with these apps and share your data effortlessly, we’re creating an App Marketplace.
The App Marketplace allows you to select the app you want to connect, authorize connection, and select and configure the data you want to share.
We’ve implemented a middleware platform that specializes in integrating platforms which is already connected to over 1,000 apps. It will allow us to rapidly add apps to the marketplace and create powerful automations that save you time.
The team is busy working on this now, and we’re aiming to test with some customers next month. If you're interested in connecting your apps with ROLLER, keep an eye out for requests for beta customers.
Managing your venue
As you know, a lot goes into managing a venue’s day-to-day operations, and it can be very stressful. Our final topic for today focuses on how ROLLER can save you time and hassle in managing your daily operations.
Booking agreements
First, let’s look at a new feature we’ve released called booking agreements. Memberships are a fantastic source of repeatable and predictable revenue. However, protecting this revenue with binding membership agreements is a legal necessity. Managing these agreements can become a time-consuming and disjointed process – one that’s inconvenient for your guests but also time-consuming and difficult for your staff.
So to improve the speed and convenience of acquiring new members and streamlining operations when membership disputes arise, we’ve developed a new booking agreement solution.
When a booking agreement is linked to a membership product, the guest will be prompted to complete an agreement within the online purchase flow. At the POS, staff can send the guest a link to complete their booking agreement via SMS or email, or they can simply direct guests to complete the agreement on the POS screen, making the purchase and redemption process seamless.
The completed agreement is then emailed to the guest and linked to the membership in ROLLER. When memberships are redeemed at the POS or members have a query about their terms, staff can easily view the booking agreement. And if a dispute is to arise, staff can find booking agreements within the Members, Bookings, or Documents pages in Venue Manager.
Booking agreements are currently in beta. So if you’d like to utilize this new feature, please contact your account manager or support.
Payments upgrades
Smart dunning
Continuing on Memberships, we've seen improvement in churn prevention from venues using Smart Dunning in the last two months.
Churn has reduced with smart dunning, recovering an average of eight members per 1,000 each month, which equates to an additional $500 revenue per month when factoring in a member's average lifetime value.
If you’re selling memberships and using ROLLER Payments, but haven’t activated Smart Dunning, then revenue is leaking from your business.
It's incredibly simple to activate in Venue Manager, so reach out to your account manager or our support team to find out how.
Payment links
On the theme of collecting payments, our new feature, payment requests, is a fast, secure, and convenient way to collect payments from guests.
You can now immediately email or SMS guests a link to a dedicated payment experience, allowing them to pay quickly, securely, and via the payment method of their choice.
Payment links provide a better guest experience, removing the need for guests to share sensitive card details over the phone and eliminating the time taken to send and follow up invoice payments.
Chargeback risk is also minimized as payment is completed via the cardholder's device, and 3D Secure shifts the liability to the card issuer.
If you're not using payment links already, they’re live and available to all customers now!
Payments Dashboard
Accurate reconciliation of funds processed against bank deposits is critical to managing cash flow. Having multiple booking and payment platforms leads to a disjointed and challenging reconciliation process, leaving you uncertain about precisely what funds are received from where and when.
Our new Payments Dashboard is another step towards providing clarity and confidence in the status of account balances, payments, chargebacks, and more. The dashboard lets you view the real-time balance of pending and deposited funds. It displays summary payment processing data by sales channel and payment method, plus a summary of chargebacks.
Customers using ROLLER Payments love the dashboard as it provides a central tool to monitor aggregated payment processing and cash flow at a glance.
Reporting upgrades
As mentioned above, reliable financial reporting is critical for you to make informed decisions, and ROLLER reporting data forms the basis for your financial accounting.
We have been working intently over the past year to deliver a comprehensive update of our underlying revenue reporting logic and technology to ensure the ongoing reliability and preciseness of our financial reporting.
You may only notice minimal changes to reporting, as these enhancements are to the underlying logic rather than specific changes to how the reports look or feel. However, if you are a power user of our reports, specifically the Revenue Recognition report, you will notice several significant changes.
The key challenges we have been focused on addressing are scenarios where staff edit past bookings – especially when items from past bookings are added or removed. In addition, we have also addressed issues you might encounter when trying to balance accounts which result in large rounding values.
The underlying goal and outcome of these changes is that all of the various actions you can take on past, present, and future bookings will always be recorded in our reporting so you can have complete surety in the integrity of ROLLER reports.
The upgrade to revenue reporting will be released over the coming weeks.
Data insights
We’ve talked with thousands of customers and visited hundreds of parks. They’re all unique, but we’ve found they have two things in common:
- They can’t find enough staff, and
- They don’t have enough time to work on their businesses.
Hearing how time-poor most customers are, we commenced a project to find ways of delivering actionable data insights so you don’t have to spend hours digging into reports. We’ve built a global data lake streaming millions of records every week. Our data scientists have developed machine-learning technology that analyzes your venue's entire history to detect abnormal events.
When thinking about the best events to test the effectiveness of these insights, we thought about fraud. Staff fraud is a concern for every business owner, but constantly monitoring every action staff members perform is impossible. So to alert you of suspicious staff behavior, we are starting by analyzing refunds and discounts. Our algorithms learn your venue’s patterns, and as a beta, we will notify you via email if any anomalies are detected.
The email alert will be sent to the primary contact configured in the ROLLER platform and will contain an attached spreadsheet with the list of actions that have triggered our machine-learning algorithms. You can then easily use the list of bookings provided to find and investigate those actions within ROLLER.
Of course, anomalies occur for various reasons, and not all of these alerts will be fraud cases. However, you can feel confident knowing that ROLLER will draw your attention to any event that may require investigation.
We’re excited by the intelligent insights we can develop to help you maximize revenue and minimize costs, and we’re working on improved ways to share and action these insights.
Keep an eye out for more updates soon!
Printer management
Online food and beverage ordering requires a reliable, two-way printer integration to prevent situations where guests are waiting on an order, but the order didn’t print because the device was out of paper, turned off, or faulty.
To this end, we’re building a new cloud printer service that connects the browser to EPSON EPOS-compatible network printers. This native, bi-directional integration monitors the status of each print job so that we can be certain that the docket has printed correctly.
If by chance, it fails, we will automatically reroute it to a designated backup printer. If that printer fails, we will alert POS staff to manage the transaction manually.
We will also support integration with a kitchen video system so that print jobs can be sent to touch-enabled monitors.
And finally, this was the perfect opportunity to revamp our printed assets and address many of the requests customers have made to personalize these. Development and testing of this are likely to be completed late this year. This integration needs to be rock solid, and we will ensure robust reliability before releasing it for beta early in 2023.
Features recap
To close things out, let’s briefly recap what we’ve covered and how you can implement all of the above new features at your venue today.
Progressive Checkout
There is no cost to upgrade to the new Progressive Checkout experience, and you can migrate your checkout by following the ROLLER Academy and Help Center guides.
The migration process is quite simple, but we understand this is a significant change for many venue operators, so we will run a workshop later this year. Otherwise, if you do need help, please don’t hesitate to contact support.
Party Packages
Our new Party Package product delivers a seamless party booking experience for guests and staff.
This feature is still in Beta, so if you would like to start using the new feature, please contact your account manager or support.
Staff Performance
The Staff Performance feature helps you monitor the service staff provide in a group or party bookings and find improvements.
The feature is free for all subscribers to the GX Score, and you’ll find the insights in Venue Manager.
Monthly Performance
All GX Score subscribers will receive new and improved monthly performance insights.
It is also free and will automatically be sent to anyone subscribed to the GX Score. If you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up for free now in Venue Manager.
Additional Questions
The Additional Questions feature allows venue operators to ask additional questions in the GX Score survey, allowing you to discover things like how a guest found your venue or what they thought of a specific area or part of their experience.
Additional Questions are available to customers on paid Lite or Pro GX Score subscriptions, and you can configure them via Venue Manager.
HQ
For operators managing multiple venues, the new HQ feature allows venues subscribed to HQ to view important GX Score data from their HQ account.
It is free for venues subscribed to HQ and can be accessed by logging into your HQ account.
GX Score API
The GX Score API feature allows you to further segment your audience and send targeted marketing campaigns to guests based on the feedback they’ve provided.
For example, sending membership upgrades to guests that gave you a four or five-star rating. Like all API requests, this does incur an API charge. However, customers currently using our APIs that are subscribed to the GX Score can use this data.
App Marketplace
App Marketplace will enable you to connect your data to a network of apps across marketing, financial and staff management.
We’ll be opening the beta program in the coming month, so keep an eye out for any beta test requests.
Booking Agreements
Our new Booking Agreements feature allows you to improve the speed and convenience of acquiring new members and streamline operations when membership disputes arise.
Booking Agreements are currently in Beta, so if you’d like to use this new feature, please contact your account manager or support.
Payment Requests
You can now quickly, securely, and conveniently collect payment from guests by emailing or SMSing guests a payment request link that directs them to a dedicated payment experience.
Payment links are live and free for everyone and can be utilized via the Payment screens in Venue Manager.
Payments Dashboard
Our new Payments Dashboard gives you clarity and confidence in the status of account balances, payments, chargebacks, and more.
The feature is free to anyone using ROLLER Payments and can be accessed via Venue Manager.
Reporting upgrade
Upgrades to our revenue reporting logic will make it easier for you to reconcile your accounts. The upgrade is free, and you can access all reports as usual via Venue Manager.
Data insights
We have started utilizing machine learning to analyze your venue’s history and notify you of any abnormal or suspicious events, such as fraud.
Again, this upgrade is at no cost to you.
Printer management
Finally, we shared the groundwork we are putting in to upgrade your printer management and move toward kitchen display screens for managing food and beverage orders in the future. The beta program will open next year.
Feature portal
Just a reminder, too, that you can submit any feature requests to ROLLER via our new feedback portal, accessible via Venue Manager.
When you’re there, you can view feature requests from other people in our community, vote on features that are important to you or create your own request/s.
You’ll also see which features have been selected for development and what progress is being made on them.
If you’d like more information on what was presented today, you can contact your account manager or support by visiting: support.roller.software
Thanks for watching!
