August 29, 2025
In this session, we’ll walk you through:
- What’s changing in the industry and why SiteWatch users are upgrading to Patheon.
- The real results: Patheon delivers stronger retail sales, higher membership growth, and reduced churn.
- What the upgrade process looks like: no downtime, no disruption.
- How we support you and your team every step of the way.
Transcript
Mike:
All right, well, welcome everybody. Thank you for joining us today. We appreciate you taking the time. So before we get started, just a few things to point out about how to communicate with us during the meeting. The chat button is disabled. So if you have a question, you can click the QA button at the bottom of your screen and then type your question. If you don't see the QA button, try clicking View Options, then exit, full screen. This will put the webinar into a smaller window. If anyone has technical difficulties, our team will be monitoring the QA button. So just let them know here. We'll have time for QA towards the end of the webinar and we'll answer as many questions as we have time for. All questions and answers will be documented to be sent out along with the webinar recording. So if you can't get all your questions or if we don't get to all your questions, just know they will be sent out. Okay. All right. Well, let's get started. First things first, we'd like to introduce ourselves. So I am Mike Marchetti and I am DRB's Chief Customer Experience Officer. I have been with the organization. I've been with DRB for about a year and a half, a little shy of a year and a half. And I'm really looking forward today to talking more about the DRB direction and our focus on customer experience. Dave?
Dave:
Yeah, hey everyone, Dave Kuchenski here. I lead a team called our Solution Consulting Team, newly created in 2025. Been with DRB now for about seven years, and prior to that, I was in product management with responsibility for Patheon.
Mike:
Okay. So like I said, thank you again for joining us today. We do appreciate you making the time. And we also want to thank you for your loyalty. As long long time SiteWatch users, we really do appreciate it. As a business, we're making a lot of changes. And just like the industry, right? The industry has been evolving and DRB is evolving as well. To start, for the most part, we basically have a new leadership team. We have new executives. And with that comes new priorities, focus, strategies, but we have a new purpose. And everything we do, every product we build, every decision we make, every interaction we have, needs to support this single purpose. And our purpose is helping operators run and grow great businesses. This is how we evaluate ourselves every day. whether it's a product design, a support process, a sales tool, we basically ask ourselves, does this help our customer succeed? And if the answer is no, then we rethink it. Also, alongside that purpose, we've made a clear promise to our operators and to ourselves. We want to be fast, reliable, and engaging. Fast, reliable, and engaging. So a couple of examples. About a year and a half to two years ago, EMV, it wasn't fast. It wasn't reliable. We went out and we worked with our third party vendors. We held them accountable. And we received a bunch of firmware receives firmware updates and we got them into our products. In addition, we also created what we call a pod within our call center where all the EMV issues were coming into those resources. So we could really centralize and really get to the heart of what the issues might be. We connected that pod to product, to engineering, right? Because we really wanted to prioritize the fixes. Coming out of that process, we put 38 fixes into the EMV reader. We now consider the EMV the fastest in the market. Reliability. We are now going after root cause. We want to solve problems once and for all and not band-aid issues. We also have started to monitor sites. We want to make sure that sites are performing well. And when they're not, we want to proactively be doing something about it. With that proactive moderate, Our uptime is now the best in class. This basically means less revenue impacting consumer issues to your sites. And engaging. Dave's gonna talk a lot about this one in a little bit. With our products, really focusing a lot on that consumer engagement. How do we increase sales? How do we increase memberships? And we've put a lot into R &D and the tools, the features, so that we can drive same store sales. I know, Dave, you're fighting it to talk more about that later. But essentially, with the commitment we're making, It's basically we ask ourselves, are we delivering the value in the way that's fast? Can operators depend on us? Are we truly reliable? And is your experience with us engaging and positive? This purpose and this promise are the guideposts for everything we're building here at DRB. So it's not just the slogan, it's our standard. And it's what we're holding ourselves in the teams every day. And as we continue to evolve our commitment. This isn't going to change. Okay, so as part of this new DRB, our new leadership, we've really put customer experience at the forefront of who we want this company to be. And what we call it is the DRB experience. And the DRB experience is basically, how do we get less reactive? Reactive to issues, problems, and how do we get more proactive? We've been far too reactive, engaging and supporting our customers. And we are now pivoting our support and our services to a proactive model because our goal is we want to build reliability with our partnerships and we want to build trust with our customers. And so at the center of that, center of the DRB experience is we have to drive customer health. And so the way we think about customer health is the site needs to be operational. Cars are going through and we're not causing any consumer friction points. So this all starts for us is we are basically using or leveraging data better than we ever have in the history of DRB across a lot of different functions to drive a great customer experience. So I'll start first with onboarding. We've made some really big differences in our onboarding and implementation processes. First, it's overnight. So that we reduce any downtime and revenue impact to that site. Secondly, we've put a lot of investments in data conversion and data cleanup. We know how important it is from a data conversion, how much it helps your sites perform. On the back end of the install, we have defined all new processes for training. How do we get you up and enable you to understand how to use the systems? We're doing all sorts of analysis, site analysis on your pricing by using our SUDS team. And we also have a direct line of support for a certain time period so that we can make sure you're up and running and being effective. Internally, we call this, we want you to be a green customer. We want green customers. Green is happy customers. The second piece to this is the customer success. We've recently built what's called Customer Health Index. We've leveraged data points to understand are our customers having a good experience with us? Those data points could be how many calls are you making to the call center or appliance failures or number of reboots. We can leverage that data to start to understand is this customer having a good experience? And if they're not, then we should be doing outreach or we should be trying to figure out how to get that customer back to being green, green, being a healthy customer. Okay. The third bullet here is around root cause analysis. And this has been a massive shift here at DRB. Let's solve the problem in the first place. Let's not band-aid the issue. And so we've redesigned our R &D teams, our quality assurance teams. We've connected those teams within our knowledge center so that we can better look at data to understand what problems are really impacting our customers. And then how do we go after root cause? Just get rid of it. When we solve a problem, we eliminate calls coming into the call center. And since we've started this, we've drastically reduced the number of calls coming in, which means we're improving the site operations and that consumer experience. Lastly, I just want to hit on what we're also doing for a customer support team. It's starting to identify issues before operators like yourself call us. I'll give you an example, recharges, right? We now run scripts every night. If a recharge fails, that automatically creates a case for our technicians that's being worked on, and we're doing outreach against it. We want to proactively be able to solve these problems before you realize the problem and then have to call the call center, which is a very reactive function. So that is just an example of other things that we're trying to find that we can proactively address. before it becomes a bigger issue. Our focus is making sure our customers have a great experience so that you can maximize membership growth, retail sales, and reduce chart. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Dave.
Dave:
Thanks, Mike. So I want to talk a little bit about these points on the screen here and how we're driving excellence every day. From a vendor management standpoint, we have a lot of hardware vendors that we integrate into our solutions. Probably a year ago, 18 months, we noticed some issues with the barcode reader where customers were having problems scanning barcodes in our XPTs. Through our data analysis, through our collaboration with R &D, we realized that there was an issue with the firmware from that barcode reader. So we went to that vendor. We actually held them accountable, had them update their firmware, and we deployed it. After we deployed it, we saw a massive uptick in uptime, which Mike is going to talk here in a minute. But it's managing all of those vendors and keeping consistency to make sure that you're receiving the best uptime as possible and the best reliability. Our data migration processes, we've done a lot of migrations now from SiteWatch to Patheon. We've learned a lot, we've built a lot, we've automated a ton. Now, the migration process, it happens overnight. You come out with a much cleaner data set when you go from SiteWatch to Patheon. A lot of our customers are using it as an opportunity to really take their muddy SiteWatch database today, scale it down map plans into a much smaller data set and what results is a much cleaner point of sale application. We've revamped our quality assurance. We've added a ton more automation. We've added stage gates into that quality process so that things have to pass, software releases have to pass certain stage gates before they get released out into the field. We now have 24 or 7 engineering support. So our level 3 teams, anytime there's a critical issue, those engineering teams are available to help troubleshoot that issue and put a fix in place if it's urgent. And then Mike talked a lot about the proactive support model. We want to continue to reach out and engage when there are issues out in the field, hopefully before a lot of our operators are even realizing they're happening.
Mike:
All right, thanks, Dave. So let's talk about the results we're starting to see. I actually, it's funny, looking at this slide now, I wish I had built this slide a little differently because it's a great story. It is really a great story. And it really goes back to the mindset of we are solving at the root cause, right? We want to remove the issue in the first place. Our goal is we don't want to impact your customers, your operations, or for your operators to have to call the call center. So that's a major metric for us. So by going after root cause around our hardware, we've cut monthly hardware restarts by more than 37%. And think about a restart. Every time you restart the kiosk, it's an issue. So We've removed thousands and thousands of issues from occurring every day at every single one of our sites. And we're going to continue to apply these processes to continue to remove those issues at the root, at the source of the issue. But what that's done is it's lowered our call volume. We're getting less calls, is less times you have to pick up the phone and call us. And we're at the lowest call volume since 2021. Because we've lowered call volume, our average wait times are the lowest they've been in 16 months and we've decreased them by more than 91%. A massive reduction in average wait times. And most importantly, all of that has helped us increase our uptime, the site uptime for each of the car wash sites. So this is a really great story and the numbers are starting to tell us really good things. But we're not stopping at these numbers. We will continue to make sure that we're driving the right initiatives that make the right difference to improve your customer experience. And we're going to push for constant improvement. Dave, going to turn it over to you.
Dave:
Yeah, so let's talk about Patheon Plus and the results that our customers are experiencing. So we did an analysis of 18 organizations, which consists of 156 sites that converted from SiteWatch to Patheon year over year. And we looked at a lot of different KPIs to see what the story was, how they were improving. And the results were pretty remarkable. From a membership perspective, we saw average membership growth over 10%.
We saw membership revenue and growth over 21%. You know, that member revenues for a variety of different reasons. It's ease of sign up, it's ease of family plans, being able to increase your share of wallet with those plan members that you already have. They're able to go out and add another vehicle to continue to keep those members longer. The membership growth has been really impressive and keeping members has really had an impact at these washes as well. So voluntary churn, we've seen a reduction in voluntary churn through things like our automated down cells within the essential web application, the EWA. We've really improved that involuntary churn at these, or voluntary churn at these washes. Involuntary churn has also seen a massive decrease at most of these washes. And through a variety of different tools like XPT recaptures, through the Dunning management that's included for free with Patheon, through a variety of other tools that we have, the more robust connectivity to our payment processors really helps reduce that involuntary churn. Just moving recharging, automated recharging of payments to the cloud has really helped. Versus that site server that's sitting on site doing the recharges. Moving those recharges to the cloud has been a big benefit for involuntary churn. Overall, our customers have seen a total revenue growth of 14 % or more. And that's across 156 organizations that have moved from SiteWatch to Patheon. So the results have really been remarkable. When you think about the customer journey,and with Patheon Plus, what we're trying to accomplish here, it doesn't just start at the wash. It starts before the wash, you know, on social media, via text messaging, on landing pages. How do you engage those consumers and meet them where they're at? You know, once they come on site, we don't want that on-site experience to feel necessarily segregated from the digital experience they had. So we're really using data within Patheon Plus to be able to orchestrate that journey across all of these different points of interaction with your customer. Before the watch, on-site, and then after the visit, how do we follow up with them to make sure that we're bringing them back and capturing information about their visit? So what is Patheon Plus? Patheon Plus is a combination of several different solutions. It's a consumer engagement platform that contains a POS and watch management, has marketing automation through our catalyst platform, and then loyalty and e-commerce through our beacon and Patheon e-commerce platform. So these are the tools that we really have packaged together within Patheon Plus to really drive home each of those really important KPI's. So it's a complete engagement solution. When we think about key KPIs at the wash, there's four that we've really settled on as kind of paramount for most express car wash operators and flex operators. Driving retail revenue being one, increasing memberships being two, reducing churn, and then scaling seamlessly. We want to ensure that the solutions that you have from DRB are really helping you achieve those goals. And we're providing the ROI to be able to do it. if that's one of those things that as you look at your data, we can help you understand the true impact that you're going to see from Patheon. So let's talk about strategies to drive retail revenue. You can do that by increasing your retail ticket average. You can do that through increasing retail traffic, so getting more people to come through your wash. You can also do it through speed and efficiency, being able to wash more vehicles. How do we do those things? Through targeted and personalized promotions, using segmentation within Patheon, not just digitally, but on site as well. Looking at XPT screens that we can recognize the first time a license plate has come onto our site. What's that experience we want to deliver to that customer? We want to show them, sign up for our text club, click here to enter your phone number and get a free wash. You know, being able to really capture information so that we can leverage digital channels to drive interactions with them later. Creating frictionless transactions. So, you the easier it is for your customers to buy from you, the more they're going to come back. So you use lines and features like pay as you go to be able to store your favorite wash, store your credit card, and store your vehicle information all within Patheon digitally to now when you show up, you get a membership-like experience and we're just billing the card. The more you can make it easier for your customers to use your wash, the more they're gonna come back. Pricing optimization, our SUDs team does an excellent job at helping you analyze your pricing and what your pricing strategies are by location. If there's an opportunity for you're either leaving revenue out on the table, SUDs can help you understand that. And then implementing those pricing changes and pathing out is incredibly easy. So, you know, within 60 seconds, you can go change the price of a plan or change the price of a product and deploy it to your locations, you know, on the XPT, on the point of sale and on the e-commerce sites. And then driving loyalty is an obvious one, but getting retail members to come back through those robust loyalty programs so that they, you know, continue to try to get rewards and utilize your wash versus one down the street. Growing memberships. pricing and value is obviously with anything that you sell is critically important, but also driving higher conversion rates. So when you get those retail opportunities and we're driving more traffic through, how do we get a higher conversion rate? How do we capture more sales in the lane of memberships and digitally? So every opportunity we get, how are we converting those people into? You know, into members using the tools that we have, whether it be the tablet, you know, those promotional strategies on the XPT. And then increasing the share of wallet, like I mentioned before, you already have, most of you already have a robust membership base. How do you take that membership base and continue to convert more and more and more of, you know, their share of wallet, getting them to spend more with your wash? And then, you know, marketing and promotional campaigns. I did a talk at ICA where we basically created a coupon or a discount within Patheon. We created codes within Patheon and then we sent out a text and email campaign. We did it all on stage and we did it all within four minutes. In SiteWatch, that's typically a six to eight week process of back and forth between DRB, getting that promotional campaign launched. So we've really made it efficient for you to launch these campaigns. So membership growth through targeted offers, multi-vehicle pricing and marketing, like I added before. then offsite membership sales is another key area. So being able to sell in places like malls and grocery stores is really, important to get out in your community and to be able to capture those members. And we provide you the tools to do that through online web pages. In the Patheon portal, you can sell a membership from right there, using a tablet with cellular or using a laptop. You can go out and really drive those. I always tell the story of Costco when they came into North Canton here where headquarters is. Costco set up tents with big flags and they were selling memberships weeks in advance of their site opening. So when they opened, they had thousands of members at their location so that they were hitting revenue goals off day one and then reducing churn. So having promotional best strategies, promotional strategies really affect your involuntary churn. If you discount heavily in your first month, you're gonna see a very high voluntary churn that next month. We do have tools within Patheon to help drive down that voluntary churn so that customers can't abuse those discounts. We'll recognize when they come back and... they won't be eligible for that discount based on the setting that you provide. Having flexible and seasonal options to reduce the churn, allowing you to go on suspension, picking up your plan three months later. Member loyalty and usage promotion. Loyalty isn't just for retail customers. You also want to acknowledge and provide loyalty rewards to your members, thanking them for six months or 12 months of membership. And then failed payment recapture, making sure that our integration, our robust integrations with these payment providers are actually capturing good credit cards, capturing the funds and making sure that the memberships are staying active. So we reduce churn through automated retention offers. We mentioned voluntary churn within the EWA. You're able to configure different offers based on when they go to cancel. You can automatically pop up a message that says, hey, we'll give you 50 % off your next month or 100 % off your first month if you stay on this plan. So those are seen to be very valuable. Involuntary churn prevention, which I mentioned both physically at the wash and digitally. And then simple plan management. User experience is one of those things that goes really overlooked sometimes in software development. But the user experience is so important to drive those KPIs. If a software is easy to use or a website is easy to use, your customers are going to buy more from you because it's just that much less friction for them within their consumer journey. And then the last thing is membership engagement. You know, making sure you're reaching out to your members, you know, not just on those anniversary milestones, but let's say you have members that aren't necessarily using their membership. You don't want to leave those members just sitting at home, not interacting with your wash. You want to reach out to them and encourage them to come back because eventually those members are going to churn out. They may not do it this month, but it could be the next month. So the more you reach out, the more you get them to come in, the more likely they are to continue their relationship with you and keep their plan and then lastly, scaling seamlessly. So being able to adapt quickly to market changes, to be able to push those promotions out very, very quickly. With Patheon, you're managing all your sites from one platform, and you ensure a reliable performance at any scale. Because a lot of your recharges, because their payment recharges are happening in the cloud, we can turn the dial up on the cloud to make sure that those payments, we have enough processing power to complete those payments, no matter how many members or how many sites you have. We want to protect our operations with enterprise-grade security. So that's of utmost important to us. We utilize a lot of really robust enterprise-grade tools, and we provide those to you, whether you have one site or 100 sites, to be able to make sure that nobody can access your systems and your data is safe. So with Patheon, we refer to it as intelligent sync versus data replication. And I'll talk to a little bit more of that on the next slide here. But it is a much more modern cloud architecture, where the payments do happen in the cloud, configuration happens in the cloud, reporting happens in the cloud. But there is still an on-site presence to keep your wash running either offline making sure those interactions on site are fast and there's no latency because of internet connectivity issues or things like that. And then I've talked a lot about reliable cloud subscription payments. We feel that having subscription payments happen in the cloud is a big differentiator for us. And so happy to talk about that more. We have seen a 98 % reduction on database load within Patheon on site. So when you think about the SiteWatch system on the left-hand side there, and this applies to a lot of our competitor systems as well, they basically, SiteWatch replicates all of the data down to each location, or the majority of data down to each location. And that's so you can sell. know, cross memberships and you can go to each site. You know, in legacy architectures, that's the kind of the best way to handle things. In the Patheon hybrid cloud, we only sync the necessary data down to each location, but there's also dynamic language within the point of sale to be able to go up and if there's a customer whose information isn't at a site, when you click a button on the POS for that customer, it will automatically go up within milliseconds to be able to capture that information and bring it back down. So it's very, very robust. And we've seen a massive reduction in that database load. For all you IT folks out there, that's really important to keep your sites up and running and keep the speed going and then, you know, business agility changes. I referenced this earlier, but you know, with SiteWatch, you've got any time you want to apply a change to your site, you got to contact support, you got to schedule an appointment, you do a consultation call, support executes those changes. Sometimes they get them right. Sometimes they get them wrong. You're not happy with exactly how they look. We got to go back and forth, back and forth. Then eventually there's a go live call and testing, reviewing those changes within Patheon. All you is log into the Patheon portal. You can edit your pricing for one or multiple vehicles. And when you click Save, you can deploy it to those sites within 60 seconds across your point of sale, your XPTs, and your EWA. So you're discounting and pricing adjustments within minutes. You can also generate all your codes within seconds. So anytime you want to launch a campaign, to be able to go generate those prepaid codes, you can do that in a very, very short amount of time. So thinking about the conversion from SiteWatch to Patheon, a couple of key points to highlight here. Zero downtime. So we do these all overnight. We've done these at hundreds and hundreds of SiteWatch to Patheon locations. We try to minimize any impact. For every day that your site's down, industry average is like $5,000 and revenue that you lose, we make sure that you don't lose that revenue. We convert you overnight and get you back up and running when you come in in the morning on Patheon. We clean data. So bringing the data over from SiteWatch to Patheon, there's a lot of customers out there that have a lot of historical data and historical products within their SiteWatch database. We'll clean all that up for you as we move you over to Patheon and get a more pristine database so that...Your reporting is much cleaner, your databases are cleaner, and everything's operating the way it should be. Secure membership and token migration. you know, especially if you're on Card Connect, moving Card Connect to Card Connect, you should expect zero membership loss. So we will leverage those tokens that you have in SiteWatch. There's no retokenization. We pull them over into Patheon, and then you'll continue to operate as you normally would. You'll still have your normal churn as you would any other day, but you'll have zero loss next to, you know, from token migration. So lastly, this is our solution to accelerate Car Wash success. I just mentioned no membership loss, but if you want to reduce your churn, drive additional retail, increase your memberships, there's a fast ROI. So going from SiteWatch to Patheon, most of our customers that have gone from SiteWatch to Patheon are experiencing positive ROI within months, not years give yourself better business agility, unlimited scale, and zero downtime conversions. So a lot of customers out in the industry are experiencing a lot of success with this solution. And so we look forward to working with you all on your conversion. So with that, I think we'll take some questions. Mike, I if you can see what's out there. Well, let's open it up for questions. do see.
Mike:
Got a few questions here. So, all right, Dave, I'm going to send this one your way. First question, do I have to switch out all my hardware to convert to Patheon?
Dave:
So no, most of the SiteWatch hardware can be reused with Patheon. There are some upgrades that we'll need to do. We upgrade your system to a newer version of Enterprise Windows. We don't support XPT 10.4s. So anything that's relatively within the last, say, 10 years of being purchased from DRB typically will support aging hardware would be the only thing. But if you have a newer system or again, a system within the last several years, you should have no problem moving to Patheon and the hardware changes will be very minimal.
Mike:
Next question. I consider myself a pretty good operator. The growth metrics were impressive, but how do I know these will apply to me?
Dave:
So I mentioned we have an ROI process. My team actually completes those ROIs. So what we can do, have us pull your data, reach out to your sales rep. We can get my team involved. We can go out, we can pull your data. We can look at where a lot of your key KPIs are, and then where we expect you to be when you move to Patheon. And so we can give you a tailored ROI based on what it will cost to move your system from SiteWatch to Patheon, and then what type of return you should expect in your business. And again, almost every time we've done one of these ROIs, we expect the ROI to be within months, not years.
Mike:
Why is there less churn when doing recharges from the cloud versus the server?
Dave:
Yeah, great question. So within Patheon, we store the tokens within the Patheon Cloud. They're direct API connections from our cloud instance in Microsoft Azure, from Microsoft Azure to the payment processor. And so those are very robust, very modern APIs. So those connections are very reliable and again, when you have to do a lot overnight, we can turn the speed of the cloud up so that the processing can, you can basically add, the best example I've heard is it's adding more lanes to a highway, right? Where SiteWatch is a one lane road from the onsite server to the payment processor. So it's a one lane road and you can't ramp up any more processing activity. And so with Patheon, we can add additional lanes to that highway to increase how many memberships we have to reload. With SiteWatch, you have a site server that's sitting on a site. Network cables can get damaged, and things can be less than pristine sitting on that site. So who knows what the connectivity is like from that site server to the payment processor. And so what we have found is by moving payments to the cloud, that connectivity between the Patheon Cloud and the payment processor is much more reliable and the payments happen much more reliably than that site server sitting on SiteWatch.
Mike:
I might have two questions here. How long would it take to switch my sites to path?
Dave:
So it depends on your site and what actually needs replaced or what that looks like. But typically, if you're needing EMV and you sign your contract, you're about 8 to 10 weeks before we can convert your site over and go through all the process to get all the equipment set up and sent out to your site. So it's typically about 8 to 10 weeks.
Mike:
One question here is the change over mandated and if so how much for one site.
Dave:
So the changeover is not mandated at this point. We will continue to support Patheon, or sorry, continue to support SiteWatch for a while.
Mike:
For a long time.
Dave:
There are a lot of sites out there on SiteWatch. I'll say that from a development standpoint, a lot of the new features and the new things that are going into our software and from our R&D dollars, are gonna be in Patheon. So, I wouldn't necessarily expect to see a ton of innovation or new features within SiteWatch. As far as the cost goes, we're getting very aggressive with our pricing. So I would reach out to your sales rep and get a quote. Those quotes are pretty easy for us to turn around. We've got a lot of your site information so we can turn around a quote pretty quickly just to get a feel for what it costs. But again, that ROI...of what you're gonna see an improvement to your business is gonna more than cover the switch to, SiteWatch to Patheon.
Mike:
That's all the questions I'm seeing, Dave. Okay.
Dave:
Well, if anybody has any other questions, please feel free to reach out. We can definitely address them over email and send something out after this webinar. So everyone, thank you for taking the time today and hope you enjoy your afternoon.
Mike:
Thanks everybody.
