Driving Measurable Growth: Laundroworks Payment Systems Deep-Dive (Product Demo)

Erik Nemes (00:07): My name is Erik Nemes, Distributor Channel Sales Manager for Laundroworks, and we have Oleg here, our co-founder of Laundroworks. We're going to walk you through the Laundroworks platform from beginning to end.

We'll start with the Value Add Center kiosk. This is really the hub of operations where you get a new card, reload a card, and access customer service capabilities, among other things. Let's walk you through that process now.

If you're a new customer walking in for the first time, you're going to touch here to get a new card. We give you the ability to have your customers register. That's great for you as an owner—you want to build up that database of who your customers are, collect their information, and have different ways to re-engage with them.

It's also great for your customers because when they get a card, they're always going to have some type of balance on it. If they lose that card, they have the ability to replace that balance with a new one. We'll skip registration for now.

Here we present you with how you want to load money. We can also highlight different bonuses: load $10, get $1 free; load $20, get $2 free, and so on. For this example, we'll show you what it's like to load money with a debit or credit card. You can select the amount, and then you'll complete the transaction on the pin pad. Simply tap to pay—you can use Google Pay or Apple Pay to complete the transaction. Then you get your card.

After that, it's as simple as walking over to the machine you're going to use. You select your cycle type, it shows the price on the machine, you simply tap your card to deduct money, and then you press start on the machine. It's as easy as that.

If you want to reload your card, all you need to do is drop it in the slot here. And if you want to use cash, you don't need to press any buttons. Do you have a dollar bill? Cash reload is very simple and easy. One dollar added—I can see I now have $16 on my card.

The idea behind the kiosk is to be as user-friendly as possible, making it easy for your customers to load money, start machines, and understand their usage.

Oleg Stepanov (02:32): One thing that's very important with these customer cards is that customers can actually check their own usage. Everything is tracked; everything is digital. In this case, we bought a card—it's been dispensed—and we reloaded it. But if we were to use our own laundry machines, like washers and dryers, all that history will appear here, down to the second.

So you have customers thinking, "Oh, did something get double-charged, or did something take my money?" Usually it doesn't, but they have a complete transaction history right here. They just go to the kiosk—they don't need to go to an attendant. They go straight here and say, "Okay, false alarm, everything is good." That cuts down on customer concerns and saves attendant time. So that's useful.

We have management functions on here as well. Attendants, employees, and operators have this management card. There's also an app for that—the employee app—but I'll just show you quickly with the management card.

If they need to give a refund to a customer, for example, they just drop this card in here. There's a PIN you have to protect: 1-6-2-1. There are all sorts of things they can do. They can dispense cards with value if somebody lost their card, even though customers can replace their own cards. They can do promo codes, add or change balance to other cards—like this card, for example. This is a user card; we just swap that in. Add value, five bucks, let's say. Done. It's very simple because it's all closed-loop balance. You don't have to go to a credit card company to obtain a refund—you just do it instantly here. And of course, you can also do this online in our back-end management system.

The other aspect is collections. You know, in laundromats, cash is still king. We're seeing more and more credit card usage, but I'd say maybe 50-50, even 60-40, it's still toward cash. People like to load paper money, so you've got to keep track of that cash.

For that, there's a collection card. So whenever somebody pulls money from the back, there's going to be a stack of bills there. You want to be able to audit that, and we keep track of all those records—all that cash movement. You just present your card. We even give you a small confirmation message: "Collection registered." And online, you'll be able to see a breakdown in ones, fives, twenties, fifties, hundreds even, that are in that stack of bills, so you can run an audit.

Erik Nemes (04:59): While the kiosk is really user-friendly, we do have a mobile app for customers as well. Everyone has a phone, so if they want to walk in, they can download the app, they can reload it with credit or debit, or if they still want to use cash, they can actually just scan their phone at the kiosk and then insert the bills, and it'll fund their mobile app account as well.

With the app, you simply go to a machine, hit pay, scan your phone, and it's as easy as that.

A couple of other things to touch on are the promo codes and reload bonuses. I think when you add a payment system, you want to know: "How do I use this tool to retain customers but also acquire new ones?"

So with the reload bonuses, you can really incentivize customers to load more money at the time of that reload because they're getting additional bonuses out of it. And with the promo codes, whether it's current customers you want to engage with or you're using different marketing tools like direct mail, Facebook, or Google, you can send out promo codes to acquire those new customers and have them redeem it at the kiosk.

So it's a great tool to not only understand what existing customers are doing but also incentivize new ones to try out your services.

Oleg Stepanov (06:04): Here's "CLEAN25"—a dummy promo code I set up. It's going to pull that down. That promo code gives you $10 for new customers.

It's going to redeem that promo code against the card, but you'll also actually have to attach a phone number. You have to register in order to obtain that promo code. So you give them the $10, but you're getting back the customer's name and phone number, which we'll use to authenticate them as well. We're going to give them a code to enter back into it, so that person can't double-dip. They can't redeem against the same phone number or card. So it kind of protects against abuse. And now you have those registered customers you can create campaigns for later on.

Erik Nemes (06:43): The last thing to touch on is that because Laundroworks is an operational system as much as it is a payment system, we integrate with different POS systems to make sure that you can streamline the other aspects of your business with how your employees are washing clothes.

So our employee app makes it very easy for them to start machines tied to orders. You can put restrictions on what employees are doing by setting limits on how often they can start machines, what they can start machines for, and it gives you as an owner a complete audit system into what your employees are doing to eliminate any potential employee theft or spillage.

So it takes all aspects of your business, combines it into one technology, and allows you to create scalable, repeatable processes that you can easily track with Laundroworks.

Oleg Stepanov (07:27): Let me give you an example. We have two apps: the customer app—that's instead of the card, they can just have the balance on their phone and tap to start machines—and then there's the employee app that Erik's talking about.

I'll give you a brief demo. I just launched it; it's called WashLynx. To tie back to the POS, there's a "wash-dry-fold orders" tab here, and it's pulling down in real time all the orders that are coming in over the counter. Whenever orders are dropped off, you create an order that's going to appear here.

So now the employee takes this bag of clothes, loads it into a laundry machine, and then they open up this order—let's say order 1290. Now they're going to start the machine for this particular order. Just tap here... and start the machine.

Now that machine—the fact that we used washer one against this order number—that all gets tracked and logged so you can really audit how your employees are doing wash-dry-fold, whether they're using too much detergent, or if there's some suspicious activity going on. It's all fully transparent.

Erik Nemes (08:36): To wrap it up, as you can see, there are a lot of different features that we include to make it easier for you to manage your store and make it easier for your customers to have the best possible experience. But ultimately, it's designed to be very easy for everyone involved.

You can use all the features and reporting, but your customer can walk right up, know exactly what to do, and you as an owner have all the remote management and in-store management features that you need to run your store efficiently without over-complicating things.