Cashless Catering - Support

[genesis]

Hi

 

Initially we were with NRS and their support was great.After Civica took over NRS there support is terrible and sometimes have to wait for 30-40 minutes to speak to the support agent and Civica have not bothered to improved their service.I know there are some cashless vendors and please could you share your experience with support etc.....Are you experiencing the same with other vendors?

 

Thanks

[RLR]

We had Cunninghams many years back and support was terrible. We moved to Vericool which has been okay. It's fairly small company but support is pretty quick at responding. I would say the program looks very old but we don't generally have any issues with it. I would say you have to pro active with contact support if know anything is coming up such as a new academic year. So don't wait until the end of August for help, put the request in early.

[Chris_Cook]

Live Register have been great on the odd occasion we've had to call them. But its rare that we need to call them because it never seems to go wrong.

 

We used to have Vericool, and had no end of problems with it. But that was a few years ago now.

[thimon]

Use Civica here. Have come to the conclusion that the actual technical staff are great, once you get through to them / get a reply they’re very helpful and knowledgeable. However, yes it can take at least 30 minutes to get through over the phone, and either days, weeks or no reply at all to emails. For transparency however, I did get an almost immediate reply the other day to an email, almost fell out of my chair!

[DrBeaker]

Cunninghams - Not particularly helpful

 

LiveRegister - Not helpful. Very surly support team/staff/helpdesk. Fob you off. Will attempt to make your IT troubleshoot issues with THEIR system. No mate, that's what we're paying YOUR COMPANY for.

 

Software is crap. "Till" equipment is something I'm sure we could have built ourselves and consists of an external USB Numberpad and a USB fingerprint reader. Data that only syncs ONCE every 24x hours.

Edited March 16, 2022 by DrBeaker

[Chris_Cook]

I won't say LR software is perfect, but its miles better than what we had before. It could do with being fully cloud based, and not having to have the IP address of the till registered on the server would be handy - that would mean we could fail over to wifi.

 

2 things we did differently when we moved to LR are getting rid of finger print readers (RFID fobs, Oyster cards + ID cards instead), and sourcing all-in-one PCs from VeryPC and ICT Direct. These were a fraction of the cost of the tills and much higher spec.

 

I don't think fingerprint technology is ready yet to compare + match 1000's of fingerprints in less than a second. Plus it cost us a fortune replacing readers every year, and when Covid came along...

 

I believe LR updated their till software for us to take advantage of larger screens and get more items on one menu. They were one of the few companies willing to let us provide our own hardware (obviously at our own risk)

 

I'd encourage others to go down the bring-your-own-till route as its daft to have to send a till off just to be re-installed or have a HD replaced - or to have to wait for a technician to come to site. Plus with the savings you can get a spare till. The support issue is no different to any other software we run across our schools - we do the hardware/OS, they just do their bit of software.

[CHiLL]

We've been with Cunninghams for years. In fact, all schools I've worked in have been Cunninghams schools. However, they are pretty terrible and expensive. I want to move to someone like IRIS, who now own Biostore. Their year 1 outlay was more expensive than renewing with Cunninghams (due to required purchasing of new hardware), but it would have become cheaper after just three years and continued savings thereafter. I've submitted the proposal twice and both times I never had a response, so I gave up.

[KevinB]

We're with Cunninghams since that's what our catering contractors use. We find their support to be variable. Some people are very helpful, others less so. They are certainly better than they were say 5 years ago.

[mthomas08]

Hi

 

Initially we were with NRS and their support was great.After Civica took over NRS there support is terrible and sometimes have to wait for 30-40 minutes to speak to the support agent and Civica have not bothered to improved their service.I know there are some cashless vendors and please could you share your experience with support etc.....Are you experiencing the same with other vendors?

 

Thanks

 

Apologies for a bump but yes....

 

We are actually struggling to get a response regarding some queries. Been a few weeks now and even after the chasing, I am still waiting.

 

Now we are considering our options and there is a possibility that we leave Civica in favour of IRIS.

[Alastairb25]

We moved from CRB to Pebble/Tali

 

A few initial quirks, that said

 

Pebble is already known in the School space

Cloud based, hence QR rather than finger prints

iPads as Tills - We networked them in the end due to Wifi issues

Integration into ParentPay, which we already use was a big plus

[mthomas08]

Apologies for a slight hijack but is anyone else having severe problems with Civica?

 

We purchased equipment a few months back and this was a nightmare just to get someone to speak to me. Emails and phone calls galore and no one got back, in the end I had to go through any number I could find and given an email address of our account manager. This process lasted for about 8 weeks.

 

Now, we have been having issues with the system since the summer holiday. We keep phoning and emailing.

My technician has phoned an average of 2-4 times a day for over a week.

-after a long 45 minute wait = we get cut off

-after a long 45 minute wait = we get voice mail

-after a long 45 minute wait = we get a real person and get cut off mid call

-after a long 45 minute wait = we get a real person and a "we are the next priority support call and someone will get back shortly".

 

Repeat the above every single day for a week. We were told over a week ago now that we were next in line.

 

I emailed 3 separate people.

 

I don't know if there is severe issues going on at the company but this problem started back in May and simply getting a person to respond has become difficult. Every response we get is "someone will contact us". I can't even blame just the support dept because I had this problem with purchasing back in May/April/June.

 

Hi

 

Initially we were with NRS and their support was great.After Civica took over NRS there support is terrible and sometimes have to wait for 30-40 minutes to speak to the support agent and Civica have not bothered to improved their service.I know there are some cashless vendors and please could you share your experience with support etc.....Are you experiencing the same with other vendors?

 

Thanks

[russlp]

We are having a terrible time, upgraded us to V9 in the summer, left us centralised to somewhere else (we didn't even know about) and haven't moved us off yet so we can't import any new students etc. Very stressful and no help at all from Civica. Even engineer that visited doesn't know what to do or how it's ended up in such a mess. Happy to take the money though...