Setting up your BlueBox2.0 ePOS as a Customer Survey Kiosk

BlueBox ePOS terminals have a setting called Kiosk-mode which allows a touch-screen PC to be set up as a customer survey kiosk with touch screen keyboard.

Benefiting from offline/online syncronisation technology, this feature will work offline all day and then sync the survey results when it gets a connection.

The purpose of this survey kiosk mode is to capture customer feedback on a few questions, capture their basic contact details and then to issue an optional voucher code so that can benefit from providing you with the information.

To set up your BlueBox ePOS as a kiosk follow these steps:

1) Set up a dedicated ePOS till and set the following settings:

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• Upload an image for the background (suggest 1024 x 768 px) - remember to leave a patch in the middle blank/tinted for the text to display on top of. A block 724px wide and 350px tall positioned at 150px left and 120px down from the top left corner, is optimal.
• Add your survey questions - these are formatted as follows:
  
  This is a question?Answer One|Answer Two|Answer 3;
  
  The question must end in a ? and the answers must be separated with |'s, finally end the question with a semicolon.
• Add some 'end text' for the survey - this will display to the customer once they complete the survey.
• If you want the survey to send a text/sms message to the customer on completion enter the message you want sent. You can use the tag {vouchercode} if you want to include their unique discount voucher code in the message.
• If you want the survey to send an email message to the customer on completion enter the subject and email message you want sent. You can use the tag {vouchercode} if you want to include their unique discount voucher code in the message.

2) If you are sending sms/text messages, remember to set the bbsettings for sending text messages in the admin > modules > module settings section. For the Gateway, you have a choice of clickatell.com (SA, UK and Global), txtlocal.com (UK and Global), logicsms.co.za, strikemedia.co.za and bulksms.2way.co.za.

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3) If you intend issuing discount vouchers with unique voucher codes, you will need to add a voucher to the ePOS 'Discount Vouchers' module. Go to sales > point of sale > discount vouchers and add a new voucher. The only pre-requisite here is that the voucher name must have the word 'kiosk' in it:

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 4) Open up the ePOS till and ensure that the latest till settings have been syncronised with the offline database. If you are unsure, click on extra > system > Delete Local Data and Refresh.

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5) Once you are sure the till settings have been syncronised, click on extra > system Kiosk Mode to switch to the Kiosk. You will see the following screens (with your own background image and survey questions):

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 6) Test the settings by clicking on the various answers, entering test user details and check that you receive the sms/test message and/or the email.

7) You can switch back to the 'main' ePOS screen by clicking on a hidden 'button' in the bottom right corner of the kiosk screen:

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8) You can see the status of your captured surveys by clicking on the 'All Sales' button. Each survey is sent to the server as a 'zero value' sale. The customer details and survey answers are sent along with it as notes for analysis later on.

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Extending User Login Period per User

Up until now, BlueBox2.0 has had a user-session length control in the configuration file. This applied to all users of the system. If left at zero it would mean that a user's session would never expire and if set to a number, that would represent the number of minutes that a session would last for.

Now there is a field in the bb_user table called session_force_timeout_minutesNUM which allows you to set the session-life per user. Once set, on next login the specific user will have a forced logout after the number of minutes specified.

A handy implementation of this would be to add the following checkbox to the standard login form -

<input type=checkbox name=global[fields][session_force_timeout_minutesNUM] value=3>

This would instruct the security wrapper to updated the account with the specified number of minutes if the box was checked.

Overriding Ability to Change Price, Qty and Discount in BB2.0 Forms

In BlueBox2.0, we have a 6 settings at item_data level which control whether their item price/qty/discount can be edited in forms. This protects the buying or selling price of an item, as well as stopping staff from discounting items that they shouldn't or changing the tax/vat codes on items that they shouldn't.

Up until now this setting has been global and no user was able to get around these controls if they were set. Now we have a new permission at bb_sales and bb_procurement level which allows this to be bypassed.

Simply setting a user with the permissions bb_sales-can_change_form_prices_qty_and_discount or bb_procurement-can_change_form_prices_qty_and_discount will then allow them to edit these fields where others cannot.

Note that any users who currently have bb_sales-all/admin and bb_procurement-all/admin will also inherit this new ability.

Multiple Delivery Addresses in BlueBox

BlueBox2.0 now accommodates multiple delivery addresses via the bb_users module.

When viewing a user you will notice at the bottom of the plugins that there is a plugin called 'User Delivery Addresses and Contacts'. This is intended to be an area where unlimited additional addresses and contact details for this user can be stored.

It's immediate implication in the system is that for Sales Orders and Despatch Notes, if the selected customer file has multiple delivery addresses, they will appear via an ajax insertion just above the manual entry area for 'delivery address' and will allow the author to select any address as required which will be populated into the free-text area in the form.

Introduction of Multiple Base Currencies in BlueBox

One of the strengths of BlueBox is it's multi-business-unit, mult-location, multi-tax, multi-currency nature. This powerful matrix makes allows us to create extremely flexible, scalable business structures on one database.

One of the historical issues or limitations has been that the currencies table has been a global feature, limiting the entire system for a certain groups of companies to a single base currency. This has now been improved to allow the setting of base/currency values at each BU/Location level. Essentially, this means that you can have a different currency table for each business/country of operation.

This has one key limitation. That is the fact that there is no 'super base' currency sitting at 'group/global' level. Any financial reporting higher than any 'currency point' in the BU/Location matrix will be useless, as it will combine base numeric values that span multiple base-currencies, thereby blurring the various values together and making the totals useless.

This should not detract from the newly found capacity that BlueBox has to allow regions to transact in any number of currencies, and now, to be able to store their base-transactions in the currency of their choice.

For older systems, the currency table will continue to operate as before (essentially at global/global level). But for new installs, there is now this option to set the currency table at various BU/Locations under global, as long as no currency table then exists above these points.