We had a great time this week hosting the 2014 Smyth Retail Client Conference! It was fun to see so many old friends and put new faces on other friends. While we walked away with many great new ideas, there are a few that stand out.
- Steve Pruitt, with Blacks Retail did a great job of kicking off our sessions by getting us to think about where we are within the trends of our industry. He brought his keen insight and some new metrics to analyzing merchandise performance to more quickly identify and exploit the ever changing market as we enter the “Connection Age”. His insight has inspired a design for a new merchandise balancing report that incorporates the metrics he suggests.
- Smyth Retail discussed the current development plans which focus heavily on enhancing the Customer Marketing capabilities. The next release will include an extremely flexible Loyalty Program that will have benefit even for retailers without a formal loyalty program. Enhanced identification of spousal relationships across the system will provide an immediate benefit for communicating with customers by gender when joint accounts are used. The ability to assign sales associate responsibilities by customer will allow clients to prepare for the next evolution in customer communications.
- Going Mobile! We outlined our plan to provide mobile access to Merchant Plus! The initial focus will be providing customer marketing data and contact lists on their personal phones allowing them to interact and maintain a centralized database. We talked about many exciting possibilities once we have a mobile infrastructure.
- We were impressed that our preferred bankcard processor, Mercury Payment Systems, sent Nick Hughes to discuss the current state of PCI. Their Secure Assist plan will help any retailer become PCI Compliant for only $45 a year! About half of the stores present said they’d be signing up. Check with your processor as most have similar plans to provide for validation scanning, and help in preparing the Self Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ C).
- Important Dates were discussed:
- Support for EMV and mobile wallets like Apple Pay is expected to be released ahead of the industry and in time for the EMV mandate on October 2015 as both Datacap and Mercury are among the first companies who are prepared.
- Windows 8.1 will be imminently supported with Merchant Plus! Version 5.0. This version represents a platform change that supports Windows 8.1 and drops support for several older environments – like Windows XP. Again, we are ahead of the industry and have several hardware partners that do not yet support Windows 8.1.
- As always, see our permanent page on obsolescence which is constantly updated.
- As we stepped through each module of the system, we focused on recent changes to the software (many from our last conference) as well as some great ideas and suggestions from our clients. These suggestions are always weighed heavily in our development plans and might well be the greatest advantage for those stores who attended.
I’d like to personally thank everyone who came. I couldn’t be more proud or impressed with everyone attending. I thank Steve Pruitt for getting us excited and Nick for his support. Rest assured, I thanked Josh and the crew at Lucca for the wonderful meal we shared Monday night. What a great time! Most importantly, I want to thank the Smyth Retail team for what they do and how hard they work for our clients every day. We all look forward to seeing everyone next time and hope more will join the party.
