You have devices at many physical locations — stores across cities, states or perhaps even countries. How do you centrally manage the experience across all of your devices? Maybe you don’t: After all, it’s complicated. But it’s not impossible, and with the right management tools can even be streamlined to a point that feels like magic.
The app and content delivery conundrum
Managing apps and content on a handful of devices in a single location doesn’t present many complex challenges: Access the device physically or remotely, deploy the latest software and move on with your day. Managing that same content and app experience across dozens or hundreds of devices in a variety of physical locations, though? Much more challenging. That’s why you need to lean into the cloud and its omnipresence as the backbone for reliable, robust content delivery infrastructure.
What if you could roll an app update out in stages, starting with a small subset of stores or devices? You could monitor for potential bugs, gather user feedback and optimize before pushing that experience out to a broader audience. You could reliably and repeatedly update kiosks, point of sale terminals, self-checkouts and more — in groups or individually at almost any scale.
Esper understands these challenges. We built a turnkey management solution for Parker’s Kitchen to quickly deploy, monitor, maintain and update various device types across a number of stores in two different states. And we did it all in less than 10 weeks.
When customer happiness is on the line, moving quickly and providing a quality device experience are crucial. Whether you need to update your POS system to add new customer loyalty features, manage self-checkout kiosks or monitor all of your company’s devices from a single dashboard, the choices you make today can affect your long-term success. Choosing the right device management partner is crucial.
Hands-off management is the future of deployment
Whether you need to push new content or update applications during off-hours, or easily deploy new hardware, it’s clear that a hands-off approach is the way forward. But what does that look like? Automated tools for app updates, cloud sync across devices for new content, and touchless provisioning for new hardware, to start!
Let’s say you need to update your inventory management system across POS systems and handheld scanners. It’s probably not a good idea to do this during business hours, so overnight deployment is a sound strategy.
That might mean having someone from your IT department stay up late or wake up early — neither of which is ideal when you’re talking about updating critical software. You can automate this entire process with the right device management platform. Schedule the update to roll out to a small subset of applicable devices, then continue the update deployment over hours, days or even weeks as all checks are met.
Deploying new devices to a location can work largely the same way. With an agile, configurable management system, you can ship hardware directly to the deployment site and an onsite employee can simply open a box and plug in a new piece of hardware. Pre-configured to connect to Wi-Fi, the device immediately downloads any required apps or content and sets itself up. In some cases, you’ll have a fully deployed and operational system in minutes.
Your devices are the lifeblood of your organization, so it’s time to treat them like it
We know a consistent device experience is the foundation great customer experiences are built on. From self checkout kiosks in stores to managing offers and discounts on their own smartphones, unifying the digital experience increases customer loyalty, reduces OpEx, improves store throughput and more.
Esper isn’t just device infrastructure – we’re a partner in success. You build amazing customer experiences, Esper builds infrastructure to deploy those experiences quickly and at scale. Most importantly, Esper gives your organization confidence: Confidence that content and updates will deploy, devices will remain reachable, and policies strictly enforced. With our robust management tools for POS, kiosks, signage, scanners and more, you can meet your customers where they are – consistently Reach out, and let’s have a conversation about your device strategy today.