GoTab Interview & The Future Of Point Of Sales

Choosing a point of sale system is a tremendous risk for a business owner. Committing to an incompatible POS system can lead to employee burnout, customer dissatisfaction, and even faulty accounting records. On the other hand, choosing a compatible POS system can lighten the workload for employees and accountants alike, facilitate seamless customer interactions, and track customer trends. In a sea of endless POS competitors, how do you choose the right one? To help us navigate the complexities of choosing a POS system, I reached out to Hannah and Mateen at GoTab, an industry pioneer in the point-of-sale industry that is consistently pushing its software to the next level. 

Mateen: Our CEO had a successful exit from his previous company as a technologist. Then, he opened up a couple of breweries. One of them was very high volume, so he became dissatisfied with what was in the market for what we call “traditional point of sales.”  He wanted to come up with a more efficient way for guests to reorder and create less friction, so he created QR ordering back in 2016, before COVID. Then COVID happens, and of course, we blow up. I’m a former operator myself, then I met Gotab during that time and joined them after that. From there, we built a kitchen display system, we built code RFID ordering, multi-vendor ordering, and a bunch of crazy stuff that is very different from what traditional point of sales offers. We are primarily food and beverage, but we work very well in a dine-in cinema space, which is where we found ourselves naturally. 

Mateen: I’d say flexibility is at the heart of what differentiates us. We work really well with larger or more complicated venues where there’s a lot of moving parts and nuanced needs. A term I like to use is hybrid service - This is where guests and staff can interact with an individual tab without having as much friction or the necessity to wait for a server to take an order. We have a very open, well developed API (application programming interface) that allows us to plug in and integrate with other systems really well. So, we’ve seen a lot of traction in the family entertainment space because there are a lot of technological needs. We consider ourselves very strong when it comes to tying in that experience across the whole tech stack. I know the majority of Clark film operators use RTS (Ready Theater Systems). RTS is an integration we are actively working on. It’s going to be a pretty cool integration where you can ring up movie tickets right on our point of sale, then we can deplete seats using RTS’s back-end. It’s really a next level integration with RTS that they have never done before. We also integrate with Innercard, which is one of the biggest suppliers for arcade games. This means that guests can have a single tab experience - they can buy a couple of movie tickets, order concessions, or they can go play games, all ordered from their phone. 

Mateen: Besides the obvious costs, finding a partner that is going to be constantly evolving with technology. If you’re looking to partner with a new POS, you do not want to keep changing your POS. Even if someone doesn’t fit all your needs today, make sure they are heading in that direction, and they’re constantly developing what’s on their road map. With AI coming into play, there’s going to be more and more software that people find interesting. Also, make sure you are partnering with a company that actually cares. Make sure that they are actively evolving their operations to make your life better. I think sometimes people get too focused on the processing costs, but be mindful that the guest experience pays for itself and so much more.  

Mateen: Gotab offers a tiered membership that is very flexible. You can create any number of tiers for your membership, and we can do automatic billing. Also, the majority of our clients get a dedicated account manager, depending on volume. There is also 24/7 customer support from real people, all based in the US and Australia, depending on the client’s time zone. We care a lot about every single partnership. We are not ignoring small venues as we scale and continue to grow, even though we are growing very fast. As we grow, we scale our account management team because we see that as one of our big differentiators. 

Mateen: If they’re looking for kiosk ordering or being able to enable their guests to order from their phone, we can make that really simple. We can text guests when their items are ready. For example, instead of buying tickets and closing a tab, once you buy your tickets, our POS will send the customer a text where they can continue using their card on a tab, keeping the tab open until they are finished ordering concessions and are ready to check out. Once their concessions are complete, they will get a text on their phone. Then, the customer can walk straight up to the concession pick-up area, say their name, and get their order. Or, if the venue knows they are sitting in a certain seat, they can run the food to them. It just depends on the venue, but there is a lot of flexibility in how you want to format your guest flow. The opportunities are endless. 

Mateen: We do track this ourselves, but we have a lot of partners that go deeper on this kind of thing for marketing or for employee productivity. Our reporting gets pretty deep by itself, like did a person view a certain menu, or did they put something in their cart and then took it out. We’re tracking a lot of individual actions so they can tailor their approach to different folks. If you want to get granular, you can see who bought a ticket to a scary movie or filter customer trends of people who like IPAs.

Mateen: We build the backend for all of our clients, then train them how to use it. So no matter who you are, even if you’re a tiny operation, we’re doing everything for you, and then we’re showing you how to use it. We are really hands-on with the onboarding process. We will also deploy for physical installations. If you are larger, we pretty much mandate physical installations from our technicians. We also just released our on-premise server. It was about a two-year development, give or take. It's a big differentiator for us because, I don’t know how familiar you are with the POS space, but a lot of the old school guys have a physical on-premise server that runs their entire POS. There’s limitations with that because not everything’s in real time. You can’t access your sales remotely, so you have to be on site to make changes. When you make changes, you have to refresh the whole system. What’s nice about our platform is that we are cloud-based primarily, but when you launch the on-premise server, we can actually run the way legacy systems do without the full redundancy of being completely offline. You can have no internet at all and run the system that way, as long as the internet gets connected at some point. When you are connected to the internet, you get all the benefits of being cloud based. So you’re able to actually see real-time sales from your phone and even make changes from your phone. It doesn’t matter where you are; you can be in Bermuda or Hawaii and make updates to your system in real time. If your internet does cut out, it doesn't matter; everything will just continue to run. So it’s bringing the best of both worlds of the new cloud benefits, plus the redundancy of being able to run an on-premise server and be completely offline at all times. 

As technology seems to be advancing by the second, choosing a POS system that adapts and grows with the constant changes of the theater industry is essential. We are seeing theaters adding new revenue streams, such as family entertainment centers or dine-in options, to keep up with the rising costs of today, which would be nearly impossible without a capable POS system. While there are many POS options to choose from, keeping in mind your business’s unique needs is key to choosing the correct one. If you have any questions about changing your POS system, please reach out to the knowledgeable team at Clark Film Buying or request a demo from the GoTab link below.