Blueprint for Success: The Essential Guide to Your FEC's Transformational Growth

Here are the key elements you need to build the foundation for your FEC's success.

You made it – you already started your family entertainment center business idea. Now, it’s time to break your own record highs and future-proof your business through transformational growth with this FEC blueprint for success.

The guest experience at your venue is the driving force behind some of the most important business decisions you make. The service you give your guests creates the narrative of what your business is about. You invest in a lot of new games, attractions, and business solutions that would make your guests’ experience better with each visit. Research found that 19% of family entertainment operators planned to add a new attraction in the next 12 months.

Because of these investments, you are also a customer. As an FEC operator who seeks the best guest experience possible, you must also think like a customer who demands nothing short of the best solutions and service from your business software solutions provider.

Customer Experience vs Customer Success

How is your customer experience as a consumer who spends heavily on different aspects of your business - from software solutions and beyond? Is your business enabled, empowered, and eased by the business tools of your trade like POS, sales tools, kiosk and readers, RFID Media, and the software that amplify your system’s value?

Do you have access to relevant ongoing training to ensure you are getting the most out of these tools? Everyone knows that you can’t learn everything about your system after a single training session, which usually happens at the launch of implementing a new business system, coinciding with opening a new FEC venue. Since a lot is going on with the business to fully learn every aspect of your in-venue and online solutions software, it’s important to work with software system partners who are committed to ongoing training that enables you to maximise your business system to get the most value out of it.

You could be doing everything you can to improve the guest experience at your venue, such as making the consumer journey easy to win guest loyalty and adopting the latest technology to maintain smooth operations, lower operational costs, and redefine your revenue landscape so you continue growing. You could be aiming for the same results as the industry giants or even the largest competitor in your area, but you can’t outpace and outperform the competition by doing what everyone else is doing. While important and to some extent impactful, these are sadly not enough to propel your business to the next level. You must be an outlier.

But how? By maximising the business systems you have to drive transformational growth visible as a consistent increase in your bottom line, minimised costs, higher operational efficiency, hyper-personalised guest experience, high-performing staff, rich customer data, and driving their return visits - the very epitome of future-proofing your business!

Would you like to increase your reload value by 200% with 60% of your customers reloading their game cards before they even arrive at your FEC? If so, read on.

What makes an FEC successful?

It could mean different things to different operators, but five key elements make up an FEC’s blueprint for success – that FECs as big as Dave and Buster’s would consider as must-haves. Industry players like them not only maximise their business software solutions but work shoulder-to-shoulder with their software or solutions partners to drive innovations. The partners you choose to work with are crucial to your own success.

Let’s look at what’s behind the success of the biggest names in the family entertainment industry and see how you can adapt these to your business:

SaaS solutions pertain to connecting and using cloud-based apps over the internet to run FEC operations such as payments, customer data, and sales. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of SaaS platforms and solutions to meet the consumer demand for faster and safer transactions and ways to engage with businesses.

It is no secret anymore that SaaS solutions drive transformational growth, given how cashless has become the norm. 90% of consumers now prefer to pay with credit or with a debit card over cash according to a study. According to Forbes, 83% of consumers prefer cashless payments, and when they do, they tend to spend more.

Part of your solutions provider’s customer success strategy plan for your FEC should include the drive for the fast adoption of SaaS solutions. Innovations like this will future-proof your business through a total transformation of how you do your daily operations.

For instance, with the Mobile Wallet – the only Apple and Google-certified FEC solution in the industry – you can get a dramatic increase in profitability without breaking the bank. 2022-2023 Mobile Wallet metric results from Embed customers show a whopping 5x increase in average reload value ($50.57) versus cash ($9.90) and credit card ($31.95). That’s a quick ROI from such a small investment on a monthly subscription – covered in easily 1 or 2 reloads.

Other than profitability, SaaS solutions give you an upper hand in terms of operational efficiency versus your competitors. Instead of queuing onsite and increasing the likelihood of guests walking out the door, the Mobile Wallet enables 60% of reloads to happen even before guests arrive at your venue. This feature is perfect for parents who want to monitor how much their children are spending, eradicates the possibility of theft, and gives the consumer full control of the gaming experience, unbothered by the need to leave the game to top up.

Because your guests waste no time going to a reload or redemption counter, they tend to spend more. The time you and your staff will spend on processing cashless payments from SaaS solutions like the Mobile Wallet takes visibly 0 hours versus 10 hours for cash and 3.33 hours for credit card payments (based on $100,000).

Another factor why SaaS solutions are an important pillar of an FEC’s blueprint for success is data collection. With tech like the Mobile Wallet, you can get rich customer data that will give you visibility over their visits, spending habits, and frequently played games. This will allow you to tailor hyper-personalised, high-value, and low-cost offers and experiences for them.

A business intelligence or data visualisation dashboard is another SaaS solution that your business system provider could advise you to leverage. One hindrance to your FEC’s success is when you’re unable to get the most out of the data you have. A lot of operational problems can be fixed by simply running the numbers and generating actionable insights from those.

Research shows that staff who are assigned data analytics work spend 90% of the workweek on nitty-gritty data-related tasks – and this does not include the analysis required to gain actual insights that drive business decisions. Reports can now be generated and automated in just a few clicks, compared to manual data labour – making it prone to human error and miscalculation. Smart analytics tools and scheduled reporting free you and your staff up of time-consuming data churn.

Data visualisation tools are effective platforms for deriving insights out of raw reports. Graphs help show patterns and pain points faster so you can make real-time business decisions, making a positive impact on the guest experience.

STATS, a business intelligence dashboard powered by Amazon Web Services, gets the data work done. This helps operators like you have real-time visibility to FEC data like game performance, revenue prediction based on retro data, inventory, and even manpower allocation.

Contrary to some notions, even small-medium FECs can benefit from SaaS solutions like STATS. Other cloud-based technologies are game-changers not just for multi-location FECs with various consumer touchpoints but are also proven effective for single-location businesses. When maximised to their fullest potential, SaaS solutions can be the key to growing your single location to a multi.

Case in point: Oregon-based Game Over Arcade has been in the business for 10 years. After going cashless, husband-and-wife duo Chris and Jennifer Donner saw significant growth: "60% revenue increase vs. our best years when we were open 7 days a week with full staff - that’s how profitable we are now operating only 4 days a week with Embed’s cashless system.” Game Over Arcade runs Mobile Wallet and STATS and is soon to open a second facility while just in their second year since going cashless: “We started doing redemption in 2022 and it’s really stepped our game further. In April 2023, we bought a new property. We’ve been renovating and, in a few months, we’re going to have it opened,” shares Chris Donner.

It’s also important to note that your solutions provider should have not only the latest SaaS solutions available to you but the most reliable one as well. For instance, it’s actually possible for you not to experience FEC data centre outages in your location if your solutions provider is backed up by a reliable tech partner. It would be difficult for your business to succeed if you experience downtimes on a regular basis.

Data centre outages cause:
• Operational and management stress; the possibility of higher employee turnover
• A poor guest experience that discourages customer retention
• Losing revenue especially when occurring on weekends, holidays, or peak hours
• Permanent damage to your FEC's brand

Remember that a reliable cashless system's architecture should be designed to boost your profitability even when your network is down. No matter how promising a SaaS solution provider is, checking the reputation of their cloud platform partner will lead you to the right decision.

Guests now expect faster, easier, and safer ways to transact with businesses, and this paved the way for the huge uptick in the adoption of cashless payments. Accepting cash payments is 3x more expensive to handle and process versus card payments according to an IHL Group study. That means lower costs for you, in addition to increased profitability as consumer preference leans towards credit or debit card mode of payment over cash and tends to spend more when paying using cashless methods.

While these sound promising, have you noticed that you are losing your hard-earned revenue to hidden merchant fees that are incurred from accepting card payments? These fees include but are not limited to:

Monthly fees
Monthly maintenance fees
Review trackers fees
Statement fees
Compliance fees

It is important to note that regular credit card payments are different from integrated credit card payments. Regular credit card payments are separate from the POS system or software and require additional steps to accept and record each transaction. At the end of the day, you’ll have to manually reconcile your POS invoices with credit card receipts to make sure everything was collected and recorded accurately.

On the other hand, integrated card payments bring in time savings and error reduction through automatic reconciliation – the expert recommendation. “A payment gateway integration can be linked to your software to automatically connect to your credit card device to accept payment, recording it back to your system,” explains Jeremy Dickamore, Payment Gateway Guru at Embed. “This automates end-of-day reconciliation, saving you time, money, and headaches. Because of the direct connection with integration, costly errors, like accidentally entering the wrong amount or overcharging a customer, can be drastically reduced.”

You put in a lot of work to earn revenue and you deserve to keep it. Did you know that you can get out of the losing end of payment gateway fees by simply changing your payment gateway provider? A 2024 Embed report shows average savings of 38% for operators who decided to go with payment gateway integration. One of these customers got more than $56,000 in annual savings! If that doesn’t seem much, that’s over $550,000 worth of savings in 10 years. Think of all the possibilities with annual savings alone – a new facility could be just around the corner.

This is why good payment gateway rates are an important pillar in an FEC’s blueprint for success. Choosing the right payment provider plus competitive rates is crucial. A lot of payment processors lure operators with promises of better prices, eventually trapping them with deceptive contracts and inflated cancellation fees. Your payment gateway provider can promise you 1.5% credit card transaction fees, but the effective rate is actually 4.5%. Adding that up for a year’s total is a great loss on your end and is not cost-efficient.

Aside from costing you a lot, card processing fees take a toll on the guest experience as well. According to card company Visa, merchants must not add convenience fees (adding a fee for customers who pay with a credit card and not cash) on top of the standard price.

Report 1

The biggest players in the industry rely on Payment Gateway Specialists to run the numbers of their current payment processor versus alternatives. While accepting digital payments is the superior option, if you’re having second thoughts on how you charge convenience fees and surcharges, you can use FREE tools like this Payment Gateway Consulting and Savings Calculator. And since most FECs cannot afford to keep a full-time Payment Gateway Specialist on staff, companies like Embed employ a Payment Gateway Guru to provide complimentary consultation and rate reviews for members of the Embed family and help FEC operators find the best possible rates for their business.

Your guests’ satisfaction is only as good as the training you and your staff receive on a regular basis. Gallup, the workplace consulting and global research group, found that businesses that put a premium in employee development like training see 11% greater profitability.

As you are equipping your business with SaaS solutions that drive transformational growth and allow scalability and getting better rates for your payment processing, you will begin to see the results to your operational efficiency, affecting the overall guest experience. You can guarantee that these are sustained with highly trained staff, another pillar of an FEC’s blueprint for success.

Because of the ease of operations SaaS solutions bring, your manpower is freed up from nitty-gritty manual tasks such as manning counters or troubleshooting token or ticket jams. They have more time on their hands to actually focus on guests. Now, what do we do with all that extra time?

With new solutions in place, onboarding your staff to the new system needs to go beyond plug-and-play. Aside from the basics of installation and troubleshooting, you’ll need cross-functional staff that are not only operators of your games and attractions but are the ambassadors of the system that run your business.

Highly trained staff know beyond basic functions of your operations. With regular training programs tailored to your operations, software solutions, and business goals, your staff should be able to:

Conduct proper inventory and product management
Increase revenue through promotion and product creation
Ability to track theft, both internal and external
Manage your location self-sufficiently
Require less supervision
Increase engagement from customers
Have a significant increase in productivity
Get more customers happy
Stay competitive in the industry

Similarly, your FEC can largely benefit from highly trained staff. An FEC that’s successful at achieving premium staff should have:
• Proper staffing management
• Increased employee retention
• Reduced reliance on contractors and support teams
• Improved uniformity and consistency in the organisation

Customer success training programs like this not only ensure that your system is maximised, but that your staff is empowered. They are no longer just waiting on guests and troubleshooting games – they can be so much more. You can design an incentive program to go with the certification to keep your staff motivated and rewarded for boosting profitability and improving the guest experience at your venue.

Embed’s Mobile Wallet has seen a massive 5x increase in average reload value from its 2022-2023 metric results from FECs who are currently using it. To unlock its full potential, Embed’s training arm developed a certification program wherein FEC staff can become Mobile Wallet Ambassadors through training conducted by experts in the solution. Participating FECs immediately saw lucrative results – an uptick in Mobile Wallet sign-ups from their guests which increased their average reload value.

To produce highly trained staff, you’ll need ongoing training. Well-trained staff provide superior customer service that increases satisfaction and loyalty among FEC guests. 42% of consumers would pay more for a friendly and welcoming experience. Running an FEC is a full-time job – so how exactly can an operator invest time, money, and continuous training opportunities for staff members?

You probably identify specific members of your staff as your go-to, leads, or ambassadors which creates a new career/growth path for your manpower. By appointing ambassadors, you can continue running the operation while empowering your primary staff to take something off their plate and execute the top-notch training of seasonal/transient staff. Ongoing training is the key to achieve this.

No one knows your system better than your solutions provider. As your business partner, they should be able to design such opportunities for you and your staff to grow and maximise your system through regular training, instead of a one-and-done approach that will only cover the basics and not all the bases. If your business has a comprehensive training program, you’ll likely experience a 218% higher income per employee compared to those with ineffective training, a study found.

A tailor-fit ongoing training program from your solutions provider should cover different learning modalities like Somatic, Auditory, Visual, and Intellection (SAVI Model) to meet the staff in the most effective learning method for them.

Let’s take the SaaS solution Mobile Wallet as the key service you want your guests to adopt for these sample training program elements. You want to unlock the 5x increase in reload value mentioned earlier. Here are some effective training program approaches that will equip your staff and maximise the Mobile Wallet’s potential so your guests can get the best value and you score greater revenue:

• Hands-on Training – Your venue is the best training ground for your staff. Hands-on training is most effective for teaching your manpower the basics of game operation and management, POS systems, and attractions. In the case of the Mobile Wallet, your staff will be more confident in converting guests to go cashless if they have hands-on experience with the step-by-step process of Mobile Wallet usage – from registration to reloading game cards. Interactive training like this sharpens your staff’s know-how about your solutions and their ability to communicate them to your guests.

- Role-play - This type of training exercise can help staff practice guest interactions and possible conflict resolution scenarios. For the Mobile Wallet, your staff can be presented with different role-play scenarios and how they can creatively and effectively insert the Mobile Wallet into that conversation. This will develop and enhance communication and problem-solving skills before your staff meets guests.
- On-the-job Training – Aside from helping new hires acclimate to their roles, on-the-job training enables them to learn from experienced staff. Likewise, a seasoned Mobile Wallet expert or mentor can provide new strategies alongside best practices in launching and implementing the solution to guests, both new and long-time staff.

• Certifications and Courses – Offering certifications and specialised courses for your staff can motivate them to advance their skills and pursue career development opportunities. GoTrain™, Embed’s training arm that’s part of its Success Squad™, has a Mobile Wallet Certification Program designed to equip your staff with tips and tricks, industry best practices, and more to successfully launch and drive adoption of Mobile Wallet at your location. Other certifications can include safety training, food handling certification, or leadership and management training.

GT Certs

• Feedback and Performance Evaluation – Regular assessment through feedback and performance evaluation is important sustaining efforts to identify your staff’s progress and areas for improvement. This allows you to provide constructive criticism, acknowledge achievements, and tailor need-based training initiatives. For Embed GoTrain™, monthly performance reviews are delivered to FEC location management to provide a comprehensive snapshot featuring staff performance on driving Mobile Wallet uptake through guest sign-ups. A review like this highlights top-performing staff, who you can incentivise to create a multiplier effect on the culture of becoming a Mobile Wallet Ambassador. You can also apply the same model to any training programs for your staff.

• Team Building – Activities like this strengthen camaraderie among peers and promote collaboration among your staff. In light of training, incorporating interactive team-building exercises into learning programs can help make each event successful. For instance, Embed GoTrain™ Live! Gameshow is a gamified training segment to engage staff with enjoyable content that brings out healthy competition and bonding among participants while learning about the Mobile Wallet.

If manpower management or staff shortage is making you change your mind about assigning staff to ongoing training, virtual training options should be made available to you. The Embed GoTrain™ Express is a guided online training that gets the job done on driving Mobile Wallet uptake while offering flexibility to your staff. This has minimal impact on your staffing concerns and addresses operational growth and seasonal spikes. Plus, this increases the velocity of Mobile Wallet adoption and reaping its benefits right away, versus rounding up a number of your staff and completing attendance for an in-person training event.

To complement ongoing training, you can involve your staff in regular community meetings that support the training goals, just like with GoTrain™ Community sessions. Touching base on a regular cadence enables you and your staff to share best practices for driving Mobile Wallet usage, guest engagement, and program announcements to bring more value to your business.

Does training pay off? In the case of Mobile Wallet adoption after GoTrain™ sessions, here are some significant results from actual Embed customers like Yakima Family Fun Center with the following results: a 5.4x increase in Mobile Wallet guest registrations after their GoTrain™ session, which resulted in a 5x increase in average reload value - from $10 to $50.

GT Results

Ready to engage your staff in valuable ongoing training? Don’t forget to check out Embed’s GoTrain™ and GoTrain™ Express programs for inspiration.

Dave & Buster’s in North America, the Veltmeijer Group in Europe, and Majid Al Futtaim Group in the Middle East – the most prominent FECs in the business – what do they have in common?

They have a solutions provider who is more than that – one with a customer-centric approach that establishes a partnership geared towards propelling the business towards success, as opposed to being a mere technical solution supplier or vendor that’s transactional in nature.

The final and most vital pillar in an FEC’s blueprint for success is the tech partner you choose. Your solutions provider - the one who runs your systems and ensures you can take a step back from the day-to-day and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Who you partner with can either make or break your operations and your brand’s good reputation. Let’s not forget that guests wouldn’t want to visit a place that where their fun spirits are hampered by preventable downtimes, poor customer service, and a bad overall experience.

Because you put your guests at the heart of everything you do, you’ll need someone who does the same for you. You can’t make a successful B2C connection if your B2B partnership is still focused on price instead of value and insights. Here are things to look for in your solutions provider:

• Customer success strategy plan – For a solutions provider, one Customer Success Agent/Specialist is not enough for an entire clientele with different business sizes, number of locations, needs, and goals.

A customer success strategy plan should have more than just a generalist, jack-of-all-trades approach. Specialisation is an important part of your FEC’s success, and partnering with a solutions provider that can zoom in on specific areas for improvement in your business is a strategy on its own. In software development, this is similar to the scrum methodology, wherein you collaborate closely with different specialists and experts from your solutions provider’s teams in an agile approach to achieve your goals faster and more effectively.

Instead of focusing on a straightforward lifecycle to onboard, engage, and renew the solutions that run your system, a good customer success strategy plan from a solutions provider should have specialty roles with focused areas, deep expertise, and narrowly defined responsibilities from the team you’re going to be working with.

• Dedicated customer success team – There is no greater testament to a solutions provider’s customer-centricity than hiring a dedicated team of specialists, experts, and gurus to add greater value on top of products, solutions, and service. When a solutions provider focuses on their customers’ transformative business growth through greater revenue, profit, and low manpower,

This is exactly why Embed formed the Success Squad™ - a team with a single-minded aim of helping their customers succeed. A team of consultants, champions, and trainers - a mix of growth gurus, SaaS experts, and payment gateway specialists band together to drive transformational growth to FECs through the adoption of the Mobile Wallet.

• Tools for success – Your solutions provider’s relationship with your business should now go beyond selling you a product. Equipping you with tools for success ensures that your system is maximised to its fullest potential, giving you the best possible results to grow your business.

With such promising capabilities and results from the FEC industry’s biggest players on the Mobile Wallet and cashless technologies, the Embed Success Squad™ delivers high-value, no-cost perks for Embed customers, which include:

FREE Mobile Wallet for 1 year
FREE STATS for 3 months
Cloud technology consultation from SaaS experts
Best practice sharing from the biggest FECs in the industry
Complimentary payment gateway cost-savings analysis from the resident Payment Gateway Guru
FREE printed promotional creative kits to drive guest adoption of Mobile Wallet
Choice of tailored training via the Embed Help Centre, 1:1 training, GoTrain™ onsite training, or GoTrain™ Express virtual training

With each member of the Success Squad™ an expert in their assigned field, you can get specialised advice, training, and insights you can leverage.

• Best tech partners – Finally, your solutions provider can have all these but miss out on a crucial factor. Who are their tech partners and third-party service providers for hardware or cloud-based solutions? The reliability of your solutions provider is measured by the reliability of their tech partners.

Cashless solutions need a reliable hybrid or integrated system for maximum operational efficiency even during network outages. A hybrid or integrated system is a strategic combination of both cloud-based systems and onsite or on-premises-based systems. Cloud systems feature computing services delivered over the internet while on-premises systems process service by onsite servers and other hardware.

On-premises servers ensure business maintenance and continuity even when the internet is unavailable, keeping gameplay and sales always up and running. FECs can benefit largely from well-designed hybrid systems as these leverage key features of both systems. Moving data online will keep on-premises servers optimised for operations, ensuring hardware is focused on its job of managing gameplay and sales while data goes to the cloud for analyses.”

FECs gain a competitive edge when they can remain operational even when their network is down. SaaS solutions should complement hybrid systems. For instance, operators using Embed products get secure eCommerce via SaaS solutions like the Mobile Wallet and data analysis and visualisation through the STATS business intelligence dashboard, while their locations don’t miss out on opportunities to maximise their revenue through operational efficiency that results to a seamless guest experience.

Without a reliable data center partner, even multiple backup onsite servers can be overworked, causing downtime. This is why Embed is known to partner with global tech giants, maximising their groundbreaking technology to adapt it for the family entertainment sector. The award-winning Mobile Wallet is still the only Apple and Google-certified FEC solution in the industry since its launch in 2019; the only non-banking, non-finance, non-healthcare solution approved to sit in a consumer’s Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. And STATS, which is the business intelligence dashboard jointly developed with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The right solutions provider is the one with the best tech partners. Embed also partners with AWS for customers’ data center platform for its cloud-based solutions. AWS is trusted by global brands like NASA, Apple, Disney+, Netflix, and the NFL – brands that have millions of users or subscribers - making Embed the most reliable solutions provider in the business.

While it’s true that there is not one path to success, SaaS solutions, payment gateway integration, highly trained staff, ongoing training, and a customer-centric solutions partner are non-negotiable. To start your own journey towards success and future-proofing your business, don’t forget to download the FREE resource on the FEC Blueprint for Success.

The Essential Guide to Your FEC’s Transformational Growth

Blueprint for Success

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Here are the key elements you need to build the foundation for your FEC's success.

Customer Experience vs Customer Success

What makes an FEC successful?

Best Business Tech: Software as a Service (SaaS) Solutions

Payment Gateway Integration

While these sound promising, have you noticed that you are losing your hard-earned revenue to hidden merchant fees that are incurred from accepting card payments? These fees include but are not limited to:

Highly Trained Staff

Highly trained staff know beyond basic functions of your operations. With regular training programs tailored to your operations, software solutions, and business goals, your staff should be able to:

Ongoing Training

Ready to engage your staff in valuable ongoing training? Don’t forget to check out Embed’s GoTrain™ and GoTrain™ Express programs for inspiration.

Customer-centric Solutions Partner

With such promising capabilities and results from the FEC industry’s biggest players on the Mobile Wallet and cashless technologies, the Embed Success Squad™ delivers high-value, no-cost perks for Embed customers, which include:

Complete the form below to secure your copy of this guide.

Related Articles

sales@embedcard.com

+1 469 521 8000

Business Solutions

Who we are

Contact Us