Preparing for a Point of Sale Vacation
As either a manager or a business owner it is highly recommended that you prepare your staff on how to deal with Point of Sale related emergencies, BEFORE leaving for your trip.
This could include such things as:
- Emergency phone numbers and contacts.
- Handling Power failures.
- Proper system shut-down and restart of POS systems and related peripheral related hardware.
- How to manually authorize Credit Cards.
- Basic communication and language skills.
Not doing this in advance could spell catastrophe for your business or cause you greater support expense.
As a recent example:
A Store Manager left for a two month vacation and was located in an area of a country that has limited phone service, and no internet. Before, leaving there was no disaster preparedness work done.
During the managers vacation, both of the following happened:
1. Their only POS register failed.
When this occurred, there were no provisions for having a backup register in place or a secondary register that could be used. They had to wait the better part of a day for a replacement to be installed. During this time period, they had no procedures for handling sales or manually calling in credit cards, so the store was simply shut-down… this meant loosing a days sales activity.
2. Extended Power Failure:
The stores power went out in the middle of the day for almost an hour. As in the above example, they had no procedures for handling sales or manually calling in credit cards, so the store was simply shut-down… meaning loss of several hours of sales activity before the system was back up and operational. All of the following issues were involved:
- Limited or no knowledge of the POS system configuration – When the power came back on the clerk restarted the register while the server was still off, so he was getting a message that the server and Point Of Sale Software’s database could not be accessed. This clerk was also unaware that there was a server in the back office of the store.
- Language/Communication Barriers – The clerk running the store barely spoke English, had virtually no computer skills, and didn’t use email, or the internet.
- Phone Issues – The clerk did not know the phone number of the phone that he was calling in on for support, so he couldn’t provide a call-back number to the support dispatcher. The physical phone that he was calling in on for support assistance was also broken, with only one of every three words coming through. This meant in addition to the language barrier, he was not able to properly communicate even what the basic nature of the problem was, or even that it was even an emergency.
- Confusion over hardware – There where actually two computers in the back office, one was their DVR for the security cameras and
the other was for the Point of Sale Software and database. When then clerk was directed to start the POS Application server, he was
actually restarting the DVR server. - Jury-rigged Equipment – Someone had disconnected the monitor from the POS application server and attached it to the DVR directly. This meant that the clerk had no way to do a proper shut-down or restart the POS server, or to log back into it once it was restarted. This involved walking a non-technical person through moving the monitor’s connection to the POS Server. This set-up was most likely done in order to save on spending an additional $80 – $150 on a basic monitor for the DVR or to purchase a switch box. None of the workers or staff was trained to address this sort of issue.
- Missing operating system passwords – The basic OS user password had been changed. The clerk was actually in possession of the new password, but had no clue as to what it was. Because of this the user was logging into the operation system using the Windows "Administrator" user. – This created a security risk.
If you have similar issue with your systems, please contact the CCS Retail Systems Support Department.
– John