In this series of blog posts, we’ve asked Geni Whitehouse, a former Navision Software employee and wine industry CPA, to interview members of our team about their favorite TeraVina features. The following interview with Jasmina Whyte is the first post in the series.
Jasmina, what feature of TeraVina is the most exciting from your perspective as a trainer and implementer? You are out there working with wineries every day, what challenges are they facing?
Most wineries are focused on customers. In their tasting rooms and online, they try to create memorable experiences for every guest. And that includes the checkout process. A cumbersome, painful checkout is a surefire way to destroy even the finest guest experience. With TeraVina, check out is streamlined and secure. So I would have to say that our customer-related features are my favorites.
What are some of the key features that make an impact for wineries?
First, wineries want to have quick access to customer information. Tasting room teams might want to know that a given customer has ordered their most expensive Cabernet on their last three visits. We keep all of the information about a customer in one place, the customer card. Here, a winery employee can see customer contact information plus customer sales history and encrypted credit cards on file. We have integration with ChargeLogic that helps our clients keep credit card data current and secure.
Common tasks like resending a receipt, checking on deliveries, or updating contact data can be managed quickly and easily from the customer card – either by tasting room staff in the point of sale application or by accounting support staff from the accounting application if necessary. All of the data is in one place. In a fully integrated system like TeraVina, there is no need to play a game of data hide and seek. It is all right there.
Wine club processing can be a time-consuming, painful process if you don’t have access to TeraVina’s batch processing tools. This feature lets managers slice and dice wine club shipments into special batches for individual processing.
With all of this customer data in one place, it is easy for wineries to create Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for customer analysis or to generate specialized lists for e-mail campaigns. And it helps that our solution is built on Microsoft Dynamics NAV so Excel is tightly integrated.
How are other wineries, the ones who don’t have TeraVina deployed yet, keeping track of a single customer across all of their disconnected applications – they have Point of Sale in the Tasting Room, a Wine Club Application, and an online e-commerce solution?
Many of them are entering information in duplicate systems. They are re-entering trade sales from their accounting application in their point of sale (POS) system. They are using their point of sale system to record wine club sales and they are entering e-commerce data in their accounting application after the fact. They may need to enter the same information in yet another application in order to manage sales tax and compliance. Every time they have to re-enter data they not only waste time, they also add an opportunity for error.
Wine club pickups are one way to illustrate the power of integrated data. Using TeraVina, a winery would create a batch of pickup orders which flow directly to the Point of Sale system. If the wine club member visits the tasting room, once the staff looks up that customer, they will receive an alert that a pickup order is available. Idle orders (which require payment) will also automatically appear and can be paid on the spot. And all of this data is immediately available to the accounting staff. There is no shuffling of data from here to there.
TeraVina removes the wall between the point of sale system and the back office, making customer data visible to everyone in the winery.