Clover Supercharges Sales
As 2021 came to a close, Clover took the first week in December to run an internal hackathon on a topic near and dear to our hearts: improving the lives of our sales teams. Fiserv, our parent company, has many different kinds of sales teams — and a lot of different partnerships with financial institutions. At first, it seemed like an insurmountable task: how to best serve sales when there are so many different sales teams working with so many different types of merchants?
The answer we heard again and again? Continue strengthening the core product and continue improving the feedback loop with merchants.
With all that in mind, here are some innovative ideas our engineering teams produced between December 6th and 8th.
Customer-Facing Marketing Display
If you’ve developed for any of the Clover Stations, you may have realized the untapped potential of the customer-facing display. Based on previously-implemented semi-integration tools, this hackathon project enables unique experiences on the customer-facing screen to advertise specials (such as buy-one-get-one-free), display company branding, or even play videos while in between transactions. As tethered Station (2018)’s are replaced with Station Duos, and even as we move into new generations of Minis, a permanent customer-facing display will become more and more prevalent for Clover, making the display an opportunity for untold creativity.
Automated Report on Top Apps By Vertical
There are a lot of apps on the Clover App Market. Over 500 at this point. With all the apps being published, our sales teams can have a hard time sussing out which apps speak the most to merchants. To address this issue, this project sought to create automated reporting on the top apps using merchant ratings to identify the best apps, and separate them out by vertical and sub-vertical. If you have a Clover app that targets a niche sub-vertical (for example, vegan cat food wholesaler), this kind of reporting could help our sales teams find and promote your app.
OrderUp (Text Notifications for Customers)
Historically, restaurants have had a few ways of helping customers keep track of their place in line, ranging from yelling group names into a crowd to giving everyone a pager. That pager is all well and good, but if you’re working out of a food truck, every bit of storage space is important. Plus, who knows where a customer will put the pager once their order’s ready. Enter: OrderUp. OrderUp targets our food truck merchants and fast casual restaurants, offering a way for customers to sign up for text message notifications about their food. That way, customers know exactly when their food is ready and no one has to spend time hunting down stray pagers in the 2020s.
Conversational Commerce Using RCS Messaging
SMS has changed the way we communicate, but there are some real limitations to what it can do. Want to set up a chatbot with customers to make table reservations? Can do. Want to include your restaurant’s logo in the messaging? Good luck. RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging tools can help with that. This project looked into implementing RCS tools to make communicating with customers more dynamic, colorful, and exciting than standard text messages. With this tool, Clover could enable merchants to send well-formatted coupons, promotions, and branded messages over many different messaging platforms, making mobile communication consistent regardless of the phone they’re on.
Ripple (Adding Voice to Orders)
Outside of the payment gateway, Clover has many avenues for input and output. Clover Ripple plans to utilize one of the lesser-used output features: the sound. If you listen to Adobe’s Wire Frame podcast, you may remember that Clover was featured on an episode about our chip reader notifications. Still, our sound can do so much more, which is what Ripple hopes to address. This project aims to literally give a voice to order totals and successfully-processed payments. This tool could be useful for merchants during a rush who need more than a visual confirmation of sales. We could also see this feature adding accessibility for those with sight impairments–especially if it’s expanded to list off line items and prices as they’re rung up.
Since our teams had only two days to complete their projects, nothing listed here is close to production ready. However, some of these projects have a lot of potential to solve pain points for our sales teams; we may end up adding them to the roadmap in the near future.
More importantly, these projects show just how much ingenuity and creativity Clover team members have when they get some time to pursue their own projects. We look forward to more ideas and projects at the next hackathon in June 2022.
