Meetup 2019: What’s New and What’s Next

Last week, the iQmetrix team hosted our annual Meetup in Denver, CO. We kicked off the event with our welcome video, looking back on all of the fun times and crazy changes over the past 20 years as a company. But then we launched into how the change has continued at an even more rapid pace and how we, as a provider of future-focused software, plan to stay on top of that change.

Part of our plan to keep up with the ever-changing retail industry is with our existing iQmetrix products. Our product teams highlighted recent changes in each of their areas of expertise.

• RQmobile. Our mobile POS has seen incredible change and enhancements recently. The product has gone from being able to just process accessory sales and perform inventory counts to now having the ability to be the sole sales tool in retail stores.
  1. Complex transaction capabilities. RQmobile can now process any of the complex transactions that RQ on a desktop can including all partner and carrier integrations.
  2. We’ve added bundles! Having the ability to create bundles for your sales teams and customers has always been a great feature in RQ, and we’ve now added it in RQmobile as well in an easy-to-use way that shows details and collapses for viewing simplicity.
  3. Mobile widgets. These interactive UI elements on the main screen allow your salespeople to remain on the sales floor, not back behind a desk, but still have the right data in their hands on the mobile POS to understand sales data, performance, contests, and more.
  4. Receiving purchase orders. We want your salespeople to focus on sales – we don’t want them distracted by the rest of the areas of the business. But the fact of the matter is that your salespeople need to be able to receive purchase orders easily in order to run stores well. Employees can now do so right within the mobile POS. Awesome, right?

Moving forward we’ll be releasing changes to RQ and RQmobile simultaneously, so your software is always up to date.

• RQ & Hub. Last year we talked about the transition of back-office functionality out of the RQ application and into our Hub application. That transition, which aimed to help increase efficiencies, has continued into our future product plans. Our recent feature emphasis has been around inventory managers and improving their day to day.
  1. Creating purchase orders. You can now do all of your auto ordering, min/​max calculations, etc. directly in the Hub web application for a more user-friendly experience. As soon as you save the purchase order it will be available in RQ for and RQmobile for receiving.
  2. Case pack ordering and receiving. You can now order and sell items by the case. This will be especially handy for smaller accessories, repair parts, SIM cards, etc.
  3. Future pricing on regular products. While we’ve had the ability to schedule future pricing for carrier price sheets, we now have it on regular products as well. If you’ve ever had to come in early in the morning and change the price on a product before the store opens, this feature is for you! You can now go in, set a date or multiple dates, and set the future price and it will take effect automatically overnight. Also, we are starting to historically track pricing as well.
  4. You can now just upload your carrier file into Hub and hit ​“Reconcile”! The app will automatically do all the matching for you and then give you the option to dive into the detail as you wish – either reconciled items or export your remaining records.
     
     

• Partner Integrations. We’ve continued to focus on building out our vast partner ecosystem to provide readily available integrations for streamlining business and helping to drive revenue growth. New partnerships include:
  1. Tracpoint introduces REVV by Rallio, which is for immediately surveying your customers and sharing positive reviews on social media or reacting to negative reviews in a timely way.
  2. Rebiz traffic counting and analysis that drives down to the salespeople.
  3. Cell Brokerage GRIP extended warranty for phones, tablets, laptops, IoT accessories, etc. This comes with not only warranty but additional security around those items.
  4. Additional accessory suppliers to grow your supply chain. New vendors on both the Vendor Managed Inventory and Dropship functionality include Cellhelmet, One Source Suppliers, Ondigo, Eternity Wireless, Atlantia, Gentec, and Drexel.

After product announcements we had Geoff Anderson, our new VP of Product, speak to the long-term vision of our products. While there may be a ton of fake news on the retail apocalypse, the reality is specialty retail is flourishing. Geoff spoke to the retail renaissance – more data, more technology, more gadgets – and how it’s the 4^th industrial revolution that’s ushering it in. It’s about the digital, biological, and physical and connecting all of those pieces together. Machine learning, AI, sensor data, etc. are here to create new experiences – omnichannel retail, cashier-less checkout, etc. We’re going to continue to partner with you as retailers on solving these problems and we’re going to continue to transform and move in the same direction that the 4^th industrial revolution demands of us. We’re going to start with our people, our processes, and our products.

• We’ve already implemented site reliability engineering as a discipline. We have people just focused on stability and scale.
• We’re transforming the technology as well and moving from data centers to the cloud.
• From a product perspective, we’re releasing more meaningful updates more often in stable, controlled ways.

And then with even more of the future in our focus, we’ve implemented McKinsey’s Three Horizons and dividing up our resources to these so we can focus on incremental changes.

• In Horizon One, 60% of our resources are focused on protecting our client’s businesses and software they are using today. Stability, table stakes features, etc. are our core focus.
• In Horizon Two, we’re incrementing. Cloud scale, machine learning for logistics, and big data are areas of focus for change.
• And in Horizon Three is where our visionaries will seed for the future. We’re already experimenting with AI, cashier-less commerce, and unified engagement.

This means we’re going API first on everything to a modular, headless platform so you can pick and choose the pieces of software that fit into their businesses.

Lastly, we announced the introduction of our Enterprise Services team. There is a lot of technical disruption and change in the retail industry and a one-size-fits-all software approach doesn’t work for everyone. As retail gets more complex, businesses and brands need to get more and more unique. Enterprise Services is a dedicated team that provides a level of service that goes beyond our standard SaaS offering. It is the primary interface for custom, non-standard projects.

This was just the beginning. You can find out more on iQmetrix and our solutions here. Discover why iQmetrix powers 20,000 retail locations (and counting).

We’re already planning for Meetup 2020! Don’t miss out next year’s iQmetrix Keynote and Product Announcements in Austin, TX from September 20 - 22, 2020.