July Product Updates

Enjoy this video demonstrating this month's ROLLER updates.

This release includes:

• Our integrations, respectively, with: Redeam, Groupon, and Alvarado

• Brand-new online checkout app

• New Guest Insights feature

• New session restriction settings for party bookings

• Ability to view form responses via POS

• All-new Membership Upgrade Email feature

• New ‘Smart Dunning’ feature

• An enhancement for membership discount benefits

• Webhooks, and

• ROLLER Payments update - new tipping features now available

Video transcript

The GX Flywheel

Every interaction a guest has with your business determines their experience.

Your guests’ journey starts in the ‘attract’ step. This step is all about building awareness and interest in your offering.

Once you’ve created awareness and attracted potential guests, you then need to engage them by converting them into a paying guest. This is commonly achieved via your website, online checkout, point of sale, or self-serve kiosk.  

The ‘deliver’ step is all about delivering on the experience a guest has purchased. 

That starts from the moment they receive their purchase confirmation and follows through to the ease and speed of redemption, what your attractions, facilities, and staff are like, as well as all the other offers and experiences they interact with until the moment they leave your venue. 

Delivering an exceptional experience is essential in order for guests to return to your venue, and advocate for your experience﹘in turn attracting new guests and making your guest experience flywheel spin.

The less friction there is in each interaction, the faster your flywheel spins and the faster your business grows. 

Word of mouth attracts prospective guests for free, and positive reviews make it easier to convert prospects into paying guests. Happy guests will then spend more in-venue, return, and share their experiences with others﹘helping you attract new business.

Our aim at ROLLER is to reduce friction in every step, making it easier for you to deliver an exceptional guest experience and grow your business.

Increasing new sales

Let’s now explore what we’ve spent the past couple of months building to help you to ‘attract’ and ‘engage’ guests and increase your revenue. 

If you’re not maximizing yield by selling out capacity, you're not optimizing your revenue opportunity. Channel and co-marketing partners are an increasingly successful method to help you reach a wider audience and sell more tickets.

Global reseller sites and online travel agents like Google things to do, TripAdvisor, and Expedia spend millions in order to attract guests to their sites, so promoting your business via these websites provides you with a great opportunity to grow your sales by maximizing capacity and reach new audiences.

Redeam integration

To make it easier for you to manage third party channels and expand your audience, we’ve integrated with a platform called Redeam. Redeam is a channel management platform that provides a real-time connection to a massive array of online travel agents and resellers like Google Things to do, TripAdvisor, Expedia, Klook, and many more.

The integration with Redeam means that guests browsing online travel or reseller websites can find your business and experiences, learn more about them, view real-time availability, and book directly via those sites.

A booking and guest record is automatically created in ROLLER and any QR codes provided to guests by the resellers are recognized at your ROLLER point of sale. This provides you with a seamless guest experience and effortless management of multiple sales channels; from booking to reconciliation, ultimately helping you to save time and get more paying guests.

This integration is available to all ROLLER customers. 

You can find out more about Redeam, and how selling in third-party channels can build greater brand awareness and increase revenue by contacting Redeam for a demonstration. 

Just visit: https://www.roller.software/partners/redeam to register.

Groupon integration

In addition to our Redeam integration, we also have a direct integration with Groupon. 

Groupon is another reseller that provides you with a large and captive audience looking for deals. While you might not want to offer discounted tickets during peak hours, resellers like Groupon are another great opportunity to increase sales by using the channel to sell off-peak capacity and build your audience.

The Groupon integration has only been available in the United States but this month, Groupon has completed updates to support the UK and Germany, with Canada and more European countries coming soon!

If you’re not already selling via Groupon, you can find out more and get set up by visiting: https://www.roller.software/partners/groupon 

New checkout app

Now that we’ve unlocked a new way to attract and grow your audience, let’s take a look at a huge new development: how you engage and convert guests with our brand-new online checkout experience. 

COVID has accelerated the transition to online purchasing and it has become more important than ever to provide guests with an exceptional, mobile-optimized experience.

While ROLLER’s current checkout conversion rates are industry-leading, our new checkout app takes the guest experience to a whole new level.

We’ve designed and built the new online checkout experience with several key goals in mind.

1. Maximizing conversion rates and average transaction value by optimizing for mobile and adopting best practice conversion patterns

2. Providing return guest functionality, such as logged-in experiences that enable guests to manage their memberships, waivers, and payment methods

3. Greater flexibility in checkout configuration, providing you with more dynamic ways to display and promote your experiences, and

4. Enabling table-based ordering of food and beverage, alleviating staffing challenges, and making it more efficient to manage the service of food and beverage

We are delivering this new checkout experience in several phases:

1. The first phase involves a complete redevelopment of the application with the latest technology to support current functionality and to test user experience and conversion rates. We are currently completing this phase via live testing with several beta venues.

2. The second phase which starts development this month adds support for logged-in guest experiences, allowing guests to access their bookings and tickets, manage their memberships, waivers, and saved payment methods.

3. Phase 3 will add support for table-based ordering after we’ve completed other supporting work to directly integrate ROLLER to printers and kitchen bump screens.

To give you a quick sense of what the new checkout experience looks like, let us show you a live beta venue that’s currently testing the new checkout application.

Early results from the beta show a huge increase in conversion and we’re continuing to work on further enhancements to boost guest experience and conversion rates. We’re thrilled to be rolling out this experience as we know how much impact it will have for you in converting more prospects to paying guests. 

If you’re interested in using our new checkout experience, we encourage you to get in contact with your account manager or the support team to apply for the beta program.

Maximizing repeat revenue - GX Score guest insights

Now that we’ve seen a few new ways to help you increase new sales, let’s take a look at how you can maximize your repeat revenue.

Our focus in the Guest Experience Score team is to help you drive repeat visitation for your venue. Research has proven that it's seven times cheaper to retain an existing guest than it is to acquire a new one, so achieving repeat visitation is critical to your business's growth. 

The key to maximizing repeat guest visitation is the delivery of exceptional guest experiences, but what makes guests happy? When talking to operators about how they approach measuring their guest experience, they share that they typically use methods like 1:1 conversations, online reviews, generic survey tools, or mystery shoppers. 

But what we found when we explored these were downsides like:

• 1:1 conversations being biased and not impartial

• Online reviews generally lacking in context; and the negative feedback having already gone public﹘impacting future guest purchasing decisions

• Generic survey tools being sent periodically; and receiving low engagement rates as a result. These delays also affected the quality of the feedback, and

• Mystery shoppers being expensive; and not necessarily representative of your customers

Furthermore, none of these methods provide you with a true sense of how your guest sentiment is tracking over time. 

To help you understand your guest sentiment and provide actionable insights to increase repeat visitation, we created a fully automated and simple tool called the Guest Experience Score.

The Guest Experience Score:

• Automatically surveys your guests directly after their experience ends to maximize completion rates and feedback quality, and

• Helps you to analyze and understand guest sentiment and action feedback to drive repeat business

We’ve seen some remarkable results from venues using the Guest Experience Score. Not only are we achieving world-class survey response rates and venues reporting up to a 20% reduction in negative online reviews, but one US group of 8 family entertainment centers reported:

• An average 23% increase in guest sentiment since implementing the GX Score

• One of those venues improved by a massive 65%, and

• This group also shared how they used the guest experience score to quickly identify a guest that had a negative experience, and convert them into buying a membership for their venue, increasing repeat visitation!

We have a new Guest Insights feature to demonstrate today which helps you understand and action guest sentiment by enabling you to:  

• View what guests love about their experience,

• See which aspects of your guest experience can be improved,

• Identify how guest sentiment is trending over time, and

• Eliminate the guesswork out of delivering exceptional guest experiences

Let’s take a look at the Guest Insights Dashboard to see how it works:

Within the Venue Manager, you can find the Guest Insights Dashboard and it has four main sections:

• A date range filter, with quick-select options

• A timeline panel, which shows GX Score and Rating Category performance over time

• A 5 star ratings panel, which aggregates factors (such as friendliness) that are most commonly chosen as contributing to great guest experiences, and lastly

• A 4 stars and under panel, which aggregates factors that are most commonly selected by guests as being most in need of improvement

Simply hover over any of the data points inside the timeline panel to see more information relating to that data point. If you want to see data based on rating categories (such as service) you can click on the rating categories button. 

One of the great things about the timeline view is being able to group data by day of the week. Here, you can filter for 3 months of data, for example, and when you click group by day of the week, you can check to see if there are any trends for how your experience is delivered on certain days of the week.

In the “five-stars rating” panel, we can see which factors have influenced guests to rate a category as 5 stars. Lastly, we have the “four stars and under” panel. Here, we can see which factors have been selected by guests as most needing improvement to create better guest experiences. 

You can hover over any factor to see more information, and you can click on it to see related commentary from guests.

As we continue to enhance guest insights, over the next couple of months we’ll be adding insights for:

• Party host performance - connecting GX Score responses to assigned booking staff, and

• Benchmarking comparisons within the leisure and attraction industry, as well your specific vertical

The guest insights feature has just been deployed and it's available to customers that are subscribed to a paid Lite or Pro plan for the Guest Experience Score. 

If you haven’t yet activated the Guest Experience Score, a reminder that it is free to use for all ROLLER customers and it takes less than a minute to set up! Just log into Venue Manager, activate it in a few clicks, and GX score surveys will be automatically sent to guests after their visit.

During your first 30 days you have access to unlimited responses and the paid plan features, including guest insights.

Party booking enhancements

Now let’s speak about the work we’ve done to help you deliver a better party booking experience. 

For many venues, parties make up 30% of revenue, so delivering an exceptional party experience is hugely important. 

We’ve heard feedback from customers about a few friction points in managing parties and we’re excited to share two specific updates with you that we hope will help you to deliver a smoother booking process and better service.

The first update is to help you simplify the scheduling of party bookings for venues with multiple party locations. 

This new session restriction setting:

• Limits the number of party bookings starting at the same time, and

• Makes it easy to update party location assignment

With this setting, you can create a single-party schedule for most scenarios, making things much simpler.

This feature is available now to all venues and subscription plans. To implement per session booking limits, simply log into Venue Manager and update your existing schedules.

The second enhancement helps you to personalize guest experiences.

There are a lot of host requirements, requests, and personal touches that you facilitate with parties, such as dietary requirements, catering preferences, decorations, and guest of honor information.    

To help you deliver these personalized services, we’ve added the ability to view form responses via POS. This means that staff checking in guests at POS can quickly check and verify any information provided by the guest, ensuring a seamless and personalized guest experience.

After their visit, you’ll also be able to easily email them a receipt of their purchase from POS, providing a white-glove service from start to finish.

Membership upgrades

Continuing in the next step of the guest experience, we’ll now turn our attention to the topic of driving repeat revenue with memberships.

Membership revenue is the best source of predictable income for your business: it’s consistent and easy to forecast. On average 35% of customers use ROLLER to sell and manage recurring memberships, and this revenue accounts for a massive 30% of their annual income!

We’re continuing to enhance our membership functionality and have got three new enhancements to share today.

Firstly, to help you convert guests purchasing one-off tickets into members, we have created a simple and automated upsell funnel, for guests to upgrade to a membership.

The new Membership Upgrade Email feature gives you the ability to send automated emails, detailing the benefits of membership, and offering guests the opportunity to instantly upgrade their ticket to a membership.

Guests can upgrade to a membership in just a few clicks, directly from the email via a dedicated payment experience, receiving a credit for the value of the ticket they’d purchased and upgrading them seamlessly to a recurring membership.

We’re currently beta testing this new membership upsell feature and optimizing for conversion. Keep an eye out for further updates about membership email upgrades.

Secondly, to optimize the collection of failed membership subscription payments and prevent involuntary churn, we’ve introduced a new feature called ‘Smart Dunning’.

Smart Dunning leverages Adyen functionality and their global network to maximize subscription payment recovery. The combination of a network processing billions of transactions and advanced machine learning technology delivers an unbelievably powerful solution to maximize recovery success by determining the optimal times to trigger payments.

Rather than attempting to re-process cards at fixed intervals that don’t take into account the reason for a payment failure, or a guest's location, the new “smart dunning” feature automatically retries the payment at the time it’s most likely going to be successful.

When activated, any smart dunning payment attempt will show in the activity stream of the booking so you can see if a payment was successful or not, and guests will receive emails to notify them of payment attempts.

If the payment is successful, Adyen will charge an additional fee for collecting the payment, and these fees will be visible in the ROLLER payment transaction invoice, which is issued at the end of each month.

Smart dunning is a fantastic way to reduce failed payments and involuntary membership churn. 

This feature is available now to all venues using ROLLER Payments and can be enabled within Venue Manager under Settings > Integrations > ROLLER Payments.

The third update we want to share with you is an enhancement for membership discount benefits.

With this update, you can now add new discount benefits to an existing membership so that both new and current members receive the benefit.

Previously, if you made a change to a membership offering, only new members would be able to benefit. Now, changes to your memberships are redeemable by existing members, giving you the flexibility to add seasonal benefits and offers to your memberships. 

If you’re not already selling recurring memberships, we really encourage you to consider them. Memberships create a consistent stream of repeat revenue, an increase in repeat visitation, as well as lifetime guest value.

If you’d like to learn more, we also have tons of great membership articles on our blog!

Improving operations

In addition to increasing new sales and maximizing repeat revenue, we also wanted to highlight a few updates we’ve made to help you improve your operations and get the most out of our platform.

Access control

No one likes to spend their time waiting in line. Long check-in times are frustrating for guests, and stressful for staff. 

To improve your guests’ experience, relieve staff, and reduce labor costs, we’re thrilled to announce an integration with Alvarado access gates.

This integration means you can now automatically manage the flow of guests into your venue with access gates. Rather than having staff scan and redeem tickets, guests can simply enter your venue by scanning their ticket or RFID wristband at an access gate. 

One of our theme park and water park customers, Lost Island is already up and running with this integration; significantly reducing the time it takes to check in guests, as well as the number of staff required to man entry.

To install access gates for your venue, simply contact your account manager or support for more information.

APIs & Webhooks

We capture a huge amount of valuable guest data in ROLLER. Our APIs and Webhooks offer you the ability to extract the value of your data by connecting it to other systems﹘helping you to get the most out of our platform.

APIs

If you’re not already familiar with APIs, they’re a connector between applications and systems. If you want to transfer, create or edit data, APIs enable each system to achieve this. 

One of the most common uses of ROLLER’s APIs is to extract data from ROLLER and publish it into third-party business intelligence and reporting platforms such as Google Data Studio or PowerBI. 

For example, one of our certified partners is Smart Segments, who create customized reporting dashboards for data including revenue, guest attendance, and memberships. Partners like Smart Segments can manage these tools entirely. They work with you to determine your needs, connect different systems and provide you with data views that can be used to improve your operations.

We’ve seen customers use our APIs for all sorts of purposes﹘from fully customized online checkouts to automated marketing, such as birthday SMS upsells.

Webhooks

We’ve also just released a new tool for third-party developers called webhooks which allows you to receive and action data in real-time. 

Gold Coast Wake Park and Cables Wake Park are two customers that have used webhooks to validate passes and reduce bottlenecks.

Rather than using a POS to manually check membership status before letting guests on a ride, these venues provide guests with RFID wristbands that can be tapped at a scanner to quickly display guests' details and membership status. 

Since this requires guest or booking data that might have just been sold, webhooks provide the data to these apps immediately.

Webhooks can also be used for tasks like:

• Real-time automated communication, such as welcome emails or text messages, or 

• Connecting to photobooth or gamification reward systems for completing activities

APIs and Webhooks open up a world of opportunity to enable you to extend upon ROLLER and develop customized solutions to meet your unique business needs. 

If you’d like to get more value out of your data, speak to your account manager, contact support or visit docs.roller.app.

ROLLER Payments

Our native payment solution: ROLLER Payments is a fantastic solution to not only process payments, but also enhance every aspect of your guests’ experience.

By offering all major payment options like apple pay, Ali pay, and credit cards, as well as cashless wallets, and BNPL like Afterpay and Zip, guests can pay how they like. This results in increased sales conversion rates and higher transaction values. 

And by offering world-leading fraud protection, you’re able to significantly reduce chargebacks and prevent fraud, rather than spend time trying to dispute it after it has occurred.

New features

We recently released an update to allow you to configure your terminal to prompt guests for a tip at the time of payment, along with the ability to allocate tips to staff members or to a tip pool, and safeguard tips with management approval, tip logs, and restrictions on the timings of tips. 

We’re now working on the rollout of tokenized tipping, allowing you to collect tips at any time, even after a guest has left.

If you’re not already utilizing ROLLER payments, contact support, and one of our sales reps can walk you through a demo.

Feature availability

So let’s go through a quick recap of what we covered today and how you can start putting it into action.

We started off on the topic of growing your sales with channel management. We shared details of our new integration with Redeam, as well as Groupon’s update to service the UK and German markets. Both of these integrations are free to use. To find out more and get started, please visit our website.

We then discussed our new checkout app. This is currently in beta, so if you’d like to use this new checkout, please contact your account manager or support.

Next, we walked you through the new guest insights feature that has been released for the guest experience score. 

This new feature is available to those who are subscribed to the Lite and Pro versions of the guest experience score. The guest experience score, however, is free to use, and you can get unlimited responses and access to all the features (including guest insights) for your first 30 days. You can activate the guest experience score in a few minutes through Venue Manager. 

Following our theme of delivering a better guest experience, we shared how we’ve made updates to improve your party booking experience by: 

• limiting the number of party bookings that start at the same time, 
• being able to assign locations to party bookings, and
• viewing forms and emailing guests a copy of their receipt from your point of sale

These updates are free to use and can be configured within Venue Manager.

We then went through a number of membership updates such as:

• An automated membership upgrade email with a dedicated payments page,
• Smart dunning to help you better collect membership payments and reduce involuntary churn, and
• Membership discounts to apply new benefits to existing memberships

The membership upgrades email is currently in beta, so keep an eye out for when this is released. Smart dunning does incur an Adyen fee for successful recharge attempts. You can find out more by visiting our help center, and you can enable it in Venue Manager. And the membership discounts feature is free to use and can be accessed via membership settings in Venue Manager.

Afterward, we spoke about how you can automatically manage the flow of guests and reduce staff costs with our Alvarado access gate integration. This utilizes our API so it does incur a charge for API usage. To find out more about this, please contact your account manager or support.

Following this, we covered how to get the most out of your data with APIs and Webhooks. Again, API usage does incur a charge, but this is dependent upon how much you use. For more information, visit docs.roller.app

And finally, we shared how ROLLER payments can improve both your operations and guest experience. ROLLER Payments does incur a charge in addition to your ROLLER subscription, but if you’d like to learn more, please contact your account manager or support.

Roadmap

Before we finish today, we’d like to share features and updates the product team will be working on soon!

Let's start by looking at features to help you attract more guests. 

We introduced our new online checkout app today which is a crucial channel to attract and engage guests. We will be completing phase one this quarter by adding support for all current checkout functionality and optimizing conversion flows.

In phase two, we’re adding new functionality to enable guests to create accounts and log in, whilst in phase three, we’re adding features to support table-based ordering of food and beverage.

Party and group bookings are another key product to attract and engage guests. Following the updates we’ve shared today, we’re looking at ways to make it simpler to sell and manage parties by creating a dedicated product type for these complex offerings. This new product type will simplify setup and selling, eliminate the need to use addons for additional guests and capture food requirements via stock variations rather than custom forms.

Next, we’re planning several updates to assist you to deliver better experiences. The first is a massive overhaul of our Location management interfaces and support for a new single product or ticket booking rules. These new booking rules will automate the nomination of a product such as a VR experience or a ticket type like a child age group to a session time based on the first booking created.

The second update aims to help deliver specialized experiences that require contract acceptance by guests such as recurring memberships. This new booking agreement feature will automate the creation and guest execution of the agreement.

Next, to help you drive return visitation, we’re planning to improve your ability to target and personalize your marketing by improving our Segmentation feature and integrating with MailChimp. These Segmentation updates will enhance the ability to manage segments, automate marketing campaigns and manage subscribers. We’re also making Guest Experience Score data available to really amp up your guest segmentation.

MailChimp is an email marketing and automation solution used by many ROLLER customers and this integration will provide you with the ability to sync subscribers daily or in real-time.

We’re also adding support for additional configurable questions in the Guest Experience Survey so you can ask questions about specific aspects of your experience or how guests found your business.

The final initiative we’d like to share with you today is a significant reporting project that has been in progress for several quarters. We’re rebuilding the way that we store and report revenue to prevent changes to historical records and provide a comprehensive history of actions applied to a booking.

This new business logic is deployed and running in the background to enable our teams to test with real-world data. This quarter we will complete this project so keep an eye out for further updates on this.

Before we finish this segment, we want to encourage you to share your feedback with us via our in-app portal. We use this feedback to identify trends and ways ROLLER can help you further succeed. 

Feedback portal

As mentioned, we’ve introduced a brand new feedback portal and roadmap tool﹘available to all users and accessible via Venue Manager. 

Our new feedback portal enables you to easily submit your feedback using a simple online form. You can now also view, vote for, and follow feedback already submitted by other users in the ROLLER community.

Our previous tool had limited capability for users to view and interact with feedback from other members of our ROLLER community. With limited commenting and alerts, it was not always easy to identify the items that were most important to our community and it lacked some ability for us to close that feedback loop.

Our new feedback portal provides a great opportunity for you to see feedback from other members of our community, and allows you to upvote and comment on existing ideas as well as submit new ideas of your own.

This really helps us to identify the things that matter most to you and your business and allows us to make the best decisions to prioritize those features.

With the ability to follow ideas, you can now stay up to date with the progress of each feature, and receive updates via email whenever a new comment is added or whenever its status changes as we progress through the development process.

This tool is now live! So we encourage you to get involved and submit your ideas and take advantage of this great opportunity to help shape our future roadmap.