Tower Blog

We are saddened to reports that Tim Batt has decided to return to South Australia to work for another software company.  After ten years with Tower Systems, Tim will be missed professionally and personally by many in the company and our customer community - we wish him all the best when me moves on in a couple of weeks.

Jonathan Tay has accepted promotion to the role of State Sales Manager (VIC/SA) and is well advanced in a handover with Tim. Jonathan’s excellent technical, communication and personal skills will help him in this role.  His last two years as Software Development Manager have seen him preside over significant changes in our software and manage several key new supplier relationships.  Jonathan’s appointment continues our tradition of not hiring sales people - our software is best sold by an expert who can answer any question without sales spin.

Jefree Lim has accepted promotion to the role of Software Development Manager and is well advanced in a handover with Jonathan. Jefree’s exceptional knowledge of the software will help him transition to this senior role.  For the last two years, Jefree has managed product Quality Assurance for us.  He has overseen plenty of quality software updates.

We are looking forward to leveraging the opportunity of these changes for the people directly involved as well as our customers.

We have made it easier for prospective users of our Point of Sale software to arrange a free online demonstration through new facilities at our website.  Growth in online sales of our Point of Sale software made the move a natural progression for us.

Our online demonstrations are truly live and interactive, they show the full facilities of our software and take prospective users into any function they want.

While a face to face in-store demonstration is the preferred option, we are committed to giving our customers and prospects what they want and feedback tells us that more and more want online demonstrations.

In the online demo situation, we are able to have the business owner, their accountant and other stakeholders all in on it even though they may be in different locations.

An added benefit of an online demo is that it shows off how we can deliver personal and near on site contact for our customers for training or support.  The infrastructure we use for an online demo is the same.  WebEx, the best platform in the world for online meetings, gives us tremendous flexibility and permits live interaction with our participants.

If someone had said that we would sell a $20,000 point of sale system without meeting the sales prospect face to face or visiting their business we would have laughed.  Now that we have done this many times, we know the value of this smart technology and the value of having the right infrastructure in our business to deliver a professional demonstration.

Using our Tower Systems Point of Sale software, retailers can easily market based on customer’s birthdays.

An email, text mesage or letter can be used to provide a gift voucher or some other item designed to bring the customer back to the business.  The ability to harvest the marketing list is part of the marketing tools in our POS software.

In addition to providing birthday and other marketing tools, we help our customers implement campaigns to increase sales from existing customers.  The key to this is understanding what these customers purchase and to know touch-point opportunities.

With the old XChangeIT newsagent EDI platform due for retirement next month, more newsagents are switching to the new platfrom.  The folks from XChangeIT sent out a new communication to newsagents today:

The latest XChangeIT LINK platform has been operating very well for the last 5 weeks and so it is now time for you to upgrade to the new LINK platform.

Some of you are due for renewal in the next month or so anyway, and some who are paid up can get their renewal at no extra cash outlay because we’ll credit you for unused days.

Either way, we are closing the old platform at the end of December, so by renewing now you are getting yourself better prepared for the Christmas season.

Visit the XChangeIT web site www.xchangeit.com.au and find the link that says “click here to download an instruction pack”.

Simply follow the instructions and it should take under 30 minutes to complete your upgrade.

If you need assistance or have any questions call our support line at 1 300 551 212.

We support and back this move and will help any Tower Newsagent with issues, concerns or questions.

Check out our stand at the GHA Home and Giving Fair which starts on Saturday at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition centre at Homebush Bay.  We setup our stand yesterday and took a moment to get this photo before leaving.  It is a proud moment to see so many parts of our company come together for events like this: marketing, support, sales and management have worked on creating a new look for Tower Systems for the gift shop marketplace.  This will be on show this weekend from ouur stand.

As the biggest supplier of software to gift shops in Australia, we use events like this GHA show to meet with existing customers and to pitch to prospects.  If the trade show is like others so far this year it will be tremendously successful for us.

We especially like gift trade fairs because of  the diversity of the businesses of attendees: gift shops, jewellers and newsagents.  Three markets we know well and like.