I posted this in the Customer Service forum last week, but I'm wondering if this might be a better place for it.
The ESO/Winspear Centre is looking at implementing Tess (specifically QuickSale) for our Front of House and concession sales. I've got some ideas on how we might do this, but I've come across one concern that I'm not sure how to address.
Their current software allows the debit/credit POS to prompt for a tip in addition to the order total and that money is automatically allocated after the payment goes through. However, I'm not sure how to make that work in Tess in the same way. We could ask patrons about a gratuity before they make their payment so that it can be entered manually, but that sounds very awkward. We would much prefer to keep the option in the patron's hands as they are processing the payment through the POS.
Given that we're in Canada (and on 12.5.0) and have to have EMV capabilities, our current POS machines aren't actually hooked up to Tess in any way. So I have no experience with how they communicate. We will be upgrading to 12.5.1 sometime this year, but even then, I'm just not sure how Tess would handle an imbalance between the POS total and the order total.
If we let the patron add the tip after the total has been sent from Tess to the POS, how would Tess deal with the additional money? If it can't handle it easily, would we just have to look at entering the gratuity before the patron can pay?
Do any of you handle tips through Tess? If so, how do you go about it? Any ideas would be much appreciated!
Unknown said: I posted this in the Customer Service forum last week, but I'm wondering if this might be a better place for it. The ESO/Winspear Centre is looking at implementing Tess (specifically QuickSale) for our Front of House and concession sales. I've got some ideas on how we might do this, but I've come across one concern that I'm not sure how to address.
We don't do this, so I'm just brainstorming, but perhaps using the ticket order contribution functionality with a dedicated payment method?
Unknown said: We could ask patrons about a gratuity before they make their payment so that it can be entered manually, but that sounds very awkward. We would much prefer to keep the option in the patron's hands as they are processing the payment through the POS.
We could ask patrons about a gratuity before they make their payment so that it can be entered manually, but that sounds very awkward. We would much prefer to keep the option in the patron's hands as they are processing the payment through the POS.
I find that I'm being asked to do that more and more with the introduction of EMV. Rightly or wrongly I've been told that you can't do tip add-on after the fact with EMV, which makes sense to me.
Unknown said: We don't do this, so I'm just brainstorming, but perhaps using the ticket order contribution functionality with a dedicated payment method?
I've been considering that as an option, and it may be the only way to handle this, currently. I'm still unclear on if we can do that after the POS has processed the payment, though. It should be possible to have the POS ask for a % tip before they insert their card and add it to the total due. If we make tipping an option on the POS, though, would Tessitura notice that the payment is higher than expected once the payment has gone through? Would we then be able to assign the balance to a "contribution"? I'm not sure how this would work, but with First Data's EMV release delayed in Canada, I can't experiment with it myself yet.