When Hardware Becomes More Than Just Obsolete.
Often while on-site at various customers I see issues were the staff is having trouble with various pieces of hardware. Sometimes this is accompanied by loud cursing, pounding on equipment, or customers being turned away because they can’t be rung up on a register. In some cases, I have seen staff so irritated, that they have take a break just to be able to calm down. Often it’s because of a long time problem that’s just been getting worse as time goes on.
Sometimes it may be a training issue, but more often it’s and issue with older equipment that has physical problems with it.
Some examples of this are:
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Older marginal workstations hanging, crashing, which damages the operating system, and/or damages application software and corrupts critical data.
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An owner insisting on spending a thousand dollars worth of support time and man hours to fight a problem with a defective printer, when the printer can be replaced with brand new one for only a couple of hundred dollars.
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Receipt printers that are constantly jamming or going into an error condition that also dumps data, thus requiring users to re-access and reprint receipts multiple times.
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Marginal Pin Pads that hang both the POS application and Register.
- Marginal network switches lock-up causing connection drops in application software.
- Intermittently faulty routers that cause issues with data packets being dropped during Multi-Site replication, resulting in fragmented database tables. This requires data to be re-replicated, increasing network traffic, and delaying day updates between stores.
All of the above issues create end-user aggravation, wastes time, and can create customer irritation. This can mean lost sales, and possibly permanently lost customers.
If you have any equipment that is plaguing you with issues similar to the ones above, please contact CCS Retail Systems for assistance. We would be more than happy to help you resolve these types of things.