December 11, 2023

In this webinar, we’ll review the standout features of Patheon® deployed in the second half of 2023 and give you a glimpse of the exciting enhancements on the horizon in 2024.

Transcript

Mytch Evangelista, Business Intelligence Product Manager - Alright, well hello everyone. Thank you for joining us for our webinar today. And before we get started, I would like to go over some housekeeping. So if you do have any questions throughout the webinar, there is a Q and A button over there at the bottom that you can click and you can communicate with us through that button. And by the end of this webinar we will be answering some questions. And so if you do have any questions, please feel free to put them on there and we will try to answer as much questions as we can. And if we cannot get to them today, our marketing team will produce an FAQ document that will be sent out. And by the way, this webinar is recorded and you can get a link to the recording as well after this event.

Alright. And also actually I forgot, and if you're having any technical difficulties, our team is here to be and monitor what's happening. So just let them know through the QA button. And I think that should be it for, for the housekeeping. And so we'll go ahead and get started. And I will introduce myself briefly.

My name is Mytch Evangelista, I am the Business Intelligence Product Manager for DRB, and I do work mostly in Patheon and I am in charge of our Patheon BI. And for today we are going to be talking about the features that we have released for 2023. So we're going to give you some highlights and talk about the key features that are beneficial for you. And also we will be giving you a sneak peek of what's coming up for our 2024 roadmap. And this is a quick snapshot of the amazing features that we have released this year, for the second half of 2023 to be specific.

We are rapidly building new features and releasing major updates every three weeks. And so what that means is the state of the product is changing quickly. And also if there's a particular feature that stands out to you and you would like to learn more about it, feel free to submit a question on the QA button and we'll make sure we get to it.

Alright, well, without further ado, I would like to highlight one of the amazing features that we have released this year, and we call that XPT Smart Widgets. So basically XPT Smart Widgets will allow you to change your pricing on the Patheon portal. And benefit of that is you don't have to contact our support team and get it set up and wait six to eight weeks for it to be implemented. You can change the pricing yourself and once you change it, it's going to basically update your XPTs, your POS terminals, your e-commerce all at once and it's going to update near real time. I would say probably like after five to 10 minutes it should all update so you don't have to wait a long time for it to be updated. And another thing you can do as well is you can customize your XPT screens according to your brand and feel.

And so you can all do that manually as well yourself if you'd like. You don't have to contact a support team for that one. And really the biggest benefit of this new feature is you can easily manage your sites on an enterprise level, especially if you have a lot of sites. So that's really a big benefit.

And another cool feature that we have released in 2023 is what we call set price to discount action. So on Patheon you can't, we have a category on the Patheon portal called add discounts where you can adjust your discounts and set a fixed price to it. So if you are changing your pricing for example, you don't have to change your pricing, if you wanted to, if you wanted to configure set pricing to a certain amount. So in this example, if you wanted your, all of your new plan customers to have the $9.99 for their first month, you can set that price to that and that's very valuable for, you know, if you're doing marketing promotions, usually $9.99 is really good for that one. So you could do that there. And then even if you apply multiple pricing for your different sites and you can use the same discount and you can even use percentage if you'd like. Yeah, it's a really cool feature right there.

Alright, the next feature I would like to highlight is the EWA Direct Links. So basically on the Patheon portal, so you can configure the types of wash packages that you can offer, and it will give you a direct link for the e-commerce. So what you can use that for is if you have your marketing website, your typical website where, you know most of your customers find you at via Google, you can link this, embed this link directly to your website, and then it will take them to the EWA website and their cart is already going to be pre-populated with that specific wash package.

So like here we're highlighting the unlimited best. So basically it minimizes the clicks that they have to do to select the specific wash type that they want. And this minimizes purchase abandonment. It's very typical in e-commerce websites to have a very high purchase abandonment. And so this feature specifically is going to help out with, with purchase abandonment and increase your sales through the EWA. Alright, it looks like we are back on. And so yeah, we were just talking about the EWA direct links and we're going to move on with the next cool feature that we have released.

And this past year we have invested a significant amount of our resources to build best in class data migration tools. And one of them is the migration success dashboard. So when you convert from different POS to Patheon for example, SiteWatch^® to Patheon, you will get this dashboard which basically gives you a picture of your total plans migrated, the total plans reloaded, and we also have the reload button in which I will explain in the next slide here.

And it'll give you your plan turn rate, you know, so you would be able to see how that migration process went and you will be able to see all of the statistics when you migrate. And also during POS migrations Patheon migrated members get a special status. So you will always, you will know the members that have successfully been imported and they will show as imported status on Patheon.

So that being said, you wouldn't have to do a blackout period where you're not selling plans until everyone else is recharged. So you can start selling plans on Patheon once you have converted, because you will know which members have been migrated from your old POS because they will say imported. So that's the special status for putting them in. And once they reload it, then we change to active status. So it is really a big benefit. So if data migrations, a POS migration is a big concern for you when you're converting to a POS, another POS, you know, just know that Patheon, we, we know that it is a high value to not lose memberships.

And so we've invested a lot of our resources on that. Alright, and mentioning the XPT Reload Button from earlier. So in Patheon, the one cool feature that we have is the XPT Reload Button. So basically what this is, is if a customer, a plan customer comes in and their credit card is either declining or about to expire or expired, they will get a screen such as this where it notifies them, notifies them that their payment method on file is failing to reload. And so they are going to be asked to provide a new payment method.

And so from there, if there is an attendant, if you have an XPT that is manned, the attendant can immediately get the card and recharge immediately. So you don't have to wait overnight, you can reload them immediately. And the big benefit that we have seen from our customers that are taking advantage of the XPT Reload Button is they're saving hundreds of members a month using this feature. And we have seen that the customers that are using the reload button have lower churn rates than those that don't.

With the XPT Reload Button, you do have to configure it a certain way. So your grace period needs to be lower than your retry period. A good starting point is seven days grace period and 14 days of retry. But that's the configuration that you need to do for you to be able to have this reload button available for you. But this is a very, very highly requested feature back then and we made it happen and we're really excited for that feature.

Alright, and the probably I would say the biggest exciting feature that we have released this year is the Portal Plan and Sales Maintenance. So you can now sell plans remotely through the Patheon portal. And so the value of this is you can have a tablet for example, or just set up your POS terminal if you want to in either a Costco, I'm just going to use the example of Costco. You can set up a tent, you can do a pre-sale membership promotion if you'd like, and then set up your tablet and sell plans there. And if you do have a call center, if you are an organization that has a call center, you can have your employees log into the portal and they would be able to sell plans from there, which is like really unique.

Then we have enhancements upcoming for the remote plan sales and maintenance, and I'll actually highlight that on my next slides here. Alright, and let's talk about what's next for Patheon this upcoming year. Actually would like to highlight the upcoming releases. The next three releases, like what I mentioned, we release new features every three weeks. And so we are making changes rapidly. So on December 12th we're going to, like what I mentioned, we're going to do enhancements for the Portal Plan Management, and you know we, by December 12th you will now be able to manage plan vehicles, be able to add or remove, you would be able to upgrade or downgrade plans.

And one exciting feature upcoming too is custom roles. You would be able to create custom roles on Patheon and assign them specific permissions and visibility. So that's going to be a good one. And then for January ninth, probably this one is one of the bigger updates is we're going to release our Commission Tracking. So how, we will also release this in phases by the way. So the first phase you would be able to scan or manually enter your employee ID. So you can attach your employee ID to a transaction and also we will be recording this employee ID in the transaction reports and Patheon portal.

We have a transaction report and if you are a data API customer, you also will be able to pull this data from the data API and obviously you probably will most likely have an HRIS software like ADP or Workday, Paylocity. And so you would be able to now add your third year HRIS. So like let's just say Workday, Workday employee ID on the Patheon portal UI. And so you would be able to do that. And then you'd also be able to, if you're an API customer, you'd also be able to pull that data from the data API.

And then for our R39 release on January 30th, we would be releasing a lot of data API updates, selling gift cards at a discount will now be available on EWA. And then I think this is a really big one. If you are an organization that has your own single sign on set up for your organization, you would able to, be able to bring that on to Patheon as well. So your employees can log on using their SSO setup for your organization. So really, really exciting there.

Alright, and so I'll be talking about three key features that you will see in 2024 on here. So I'll start out with Customer Notifications. So in Patheon we have this feature called customer segments. So basically you would be able to pull a report of certain segments of customers, say like customers that have a contact information, customers that have the best wash and limited plan, things like that. So basically you would be able to select a few and you know, you can pull a report and be able to target them with marketing emails or whatever you want to use that for.

But typically marketing is the typical use case for it. So with customer notifications, this is upcoming this year, you now would be able to send them notifications via text or email as you see here on the screenshot. So there's different events, I would call them trigger events that you can use to trigger an email or a text to a customer. So one of them is the new plan welcome. So when they sign up for a membership for the first time, you know, you inform them hey, this is where you manage your membership plan, you know, details or whatnot. And obviously that helps you increase your mobile app traffic.

And then another thing is successful payment. Basically it's acting as a receipt. You can use this as a form of receipt, you know, that can reduce your cost of physical receipts. And then these next two are probably the big ones. And so every car wash operator is probably concerned about their churns. And so if you wanted to mitigate your churn and lower it down, prevent churn, you can now reach out to them via text or via email if you want to, if their credit card is declining or if their card is about to expire.

And so that would prompt them to update their credit card information and that's a really, really cool feature I think. And another thing is now being able to notify your customers that a reload is about to take place on their credit card. And some states, depending on which state you are operating in, some states have different compliance when it comes to recharges like recurring subscriptions. And so this feature will help you be compliant with those specific state laws.

Alright, and the next thing is XPT Promotion using Segments. So I have just briefly explained what segments are. Customer segments are on Patheon. So what's upcoming for 2024 is you would be able to do XPT promotions using those segments, then you can deliver very targeted offers for high value customers. So there's a few use cases that you can use this for. So, and also this works best if you have LPR obviously. And so the first one is if you have a unique first time visit to your car wash, a single wash customer, you know, you can target them with, you can pull that customer segment and create an XPT promotion based on that. Just an example, like a free wash for like a first customer visit, give them a great experience.

And then another one is if you wanted to do a plan upgrade offer for a high usage member. So let's just say you have a plan customer who is using your, who is subscribed under your bottom package, your basic package. And if you're noticing that there's quite a few that are using it a little bit more often than usual, you can target them with marketing offers, you know, to upgrade to the top wash. You know, maybe they're seeing the value of it, you know, and that's a prime opportunity to upsell them to the higher plan. You can do plan anniversary rewards, you can offer free digital gift card for example. And then if you are seeing a regular single wash customer and you know if that's an opportunity to upsell them for either like an EWA pay as you go, where they just give their credit card and so it's just they're in the system and they can just like go wash their cars whenever without having to even pull, pull out their credit card, or just upsell them to a membership as well. So that's a really exciting feature upcoming.

And lastly, I wanted to highlight this one. I think this is going to be really exciting as well. And so upcoming in 2024, we're going to make the express mode available on POS and tablet. So basically what that means is, and you see like the comps here, and basically if you're on a tablet for example, you can pull up, you know, your POS terminal on there and it's going to have these shortcuts, you know, of usual transactions that you have and there's like a lot of comments, but usually, you know, people buy the top package, people buy a gift card, you know, all of those things and you would be able to configure those shortcuts. And this one, the biggest use case for this one is if you have a long line, say it's like a very busy day and you have this long line of customers and then your attendants can have a tablet and start selling and start doing transactions in line. So your throughput is just going and going and there's no holdup on the XPTs.

So that's a really, really exciting feature that's upcoming in 2024. And pretty much that is the breadth of what I was going to present today. And as I said, we can take some questions if there are any.

It looks like there are some, so I'm going to look at them, okay? Okay, there's a question here. Does Patheon automatically text a member if the phone number is on file to bring them to a portal to update, they declined an expiring credit card. So yes, with the customer notifications feature that we have upcoming. So if they are a member, they are going to be required to provide a phone number. So that's the minimum requirement for Patheon plans when they sign up. So if you do have the phone number there, yeah, and then you have the customer notifications on and then you would be able to configure that customer, like that text message to be sent to that. So that's the, the value of that customer notification. So yes, like once customer notifications is available, that will be, that will be available for you.

Alright, next question. Oh yeah, I guess I didn't answer like the second question, will it bring them to a portal. So it will direct them to your EWA, because the EWA is the where you would manage your plans. So I think the second question was about that too.

Alright, there is another question. Is a two-way API ready yet for Patheon? So in 2024, that's actually a good question. We will have that available. And so right now that is still in the works, so not quite ready yet, but we are working on it. Alright, let's look at some other questions. Alright, just reading this one right here.

Alright, so this question says if the member doesn't have a phone number or email address on file, can Patheon XPT prompt them to update their phone number or email when they visit this site? So right now, Patheon XPT doesn't do that right now, but I can dig deep further to make sure I didn't miss anything. I think I have mentioned earlier, I mostly work with data, so I'm the BI manager, but I can verify for you for sure. So we'll collect this, these questions and provide answers.

And then another question here. How long does it take for multi-site upgrade for, how do long does it take for a multi-site upgrade to take place I think I assume the question was. It can vary, obviously it depends on like how many sites do you, you have, obviously the more sites you have, it can take a little bit longer. But what we've done for Patheon is we wanted to shorten that timeframe. I can get you an answer on that one as well to just be more clear.

Alright. Next question here. And the other question here says, does Patheon allow payroll and commission reports to export directly to Excel or QuickBooks? So right now, not yet. We do have an accounting integration coming up at some point. We're working on the pilot this year and it's not quite ready yet. But we also don't have payroll from Patheon, at least right now, we don't have that available. So I'm going to answer no on that one. But sooner in the near future we're going to have the accounting integration available. Let's read another question here.

Okay, another question here. Does Patheon track all license plate numbers, not just members, meaning I can see the history on the license plate number that is not a member? Yes, if you do have the LPR, if you have LPR for your site, yes you will be able to track that. And then with Patheon you have the option to select to turn on the customer tracking feature. Some customers opt out of that, but if you do want to turn on, our support team can turn that on for you. But yes, you will be able to track all of your license plates, not just members. And that's the big benefit of license plate recognition.

Okay, so this question, this is a good one. We currently have the option for customers to update their credit card at our XPT when they, when their recharged didn't go through, but it doesn't go through until the next day. With a reload button did you say it would recharge them right away? Yes, yes, that is right. In Patheon you won't have to wait overnight. Yeah, your attendant will just get the credit card from your customer and it will reload right away so it prevents churn and that's huge.

Right, another question here. Does Patheon work with all models of XPTs or does it only work with newer models? This one I'll probably follow up with you on because I'm not very well versed in the hardware side of things. And so we'll follow up on our FAQ that we send after the webinar. Alright, let's read through another question here. Okay, this question. Will Patheon API eventually allow the creation or maintenance of member accounts, credit cards, license plates, et cetera, through API calls?

I believe you are referring to a two-way API. And so I think I may have answered this same question a little bit earlier. So we are working on a two-way API, which is basically kind of one of the things you're mentioning. Be able to update or create a record, be able to maintain member accounts. So right now we don't have it ready yet, but it is in the works.

Alright, that was like a lot of great questions. I don't think I see other questions and I may have missed some and I apologize, but we will collect all of these questions and follow up with you with an FAQ document and you'll also get a link of this recording after our session today. But it looks like we don't have other questions here. And it's been a delight presenting the Patheon roadmap this year and our exciting features for next year. And if you have other questions, feel free to reach out to our support team and I'm sure we'll chat again soon. Okay, bye everyone.