You Have Questions ANSWERS!

A: We recommend identifying an employee who will take responsibility for the routine management of the system. The champion’s tasks can include data mining for reports, setting pricing, collecting contact info for marketing, and overseeing security. They would also work with the Intercard support team to implement the free system upgrades we send out. A card system champion is a full-time job, but you don’t need a forensic accountant or IT guru to do it. It must be someone who pays attention to detail and has a passion for arcades.

A: It starts with the security settings on your cashless technology system. We have to ensure that the group and user settings are set to lock down the system without negatively impacting an employee’s ability to take care of the customer. We want them to feel empowered, but we also don’t want them to have unlimited access to the data. Many times, there are too many people in the system with administrator privileges that they don’t need to do their job. You don’t want employees giving away thousands of redemption points, so you might limit them to 25 points per day per customer account. Managers and executive managers could have higher limits. It would be best if you also did a regular review of bulk-encoded cards to ensure that someone hasn’t created a bulk order that’s not assigned to a particular customer or party booking. That can be a sign of fraud.

A: A great way to do that is to use the card readers to present ads to your customers right at the game. You can set the readers to show messages about your Happy Hour promotion, Monday Night Madness specials, or the live band you have each week. You can also display these messages on the large monitors on your iTeller kiosks.

Use the system to register customers for your loyalty program and to generate reports to show how the program is doing. Loyalty programs can bring in more revenue if you tailor them to your location and customers; you must mine the correct data to figure that out. Loyalty programs are not one size fits all; everybody’s got to try their own thing.•

Jason Mitchell has worked in the amusement industry for more than 36 years. For more than 11 years, he has brought his deep knowledge of customer service and technology to Intercard’s customers. He has been a speaker at industry gatherings hosted by such leading trade associations as the BPAA, the AMOA, and IAAPA. He welcomes questions at jmitchell@intercardinc.com.