We all know that retail is a competitive industry and Drew Malsbury, Director of IT at Bottle King, knows that time is a valuable resource to a store manager. His goal is to make sure they are able to get the most out of the limited hours they have. How do they do it? According to leading wine and spirits retailer Bottle King, it’s all in the way they manage their stores.
Putting an end to employee theft
Employee theft is hard to identify and even harder to gather evidence for. Within weeks of installing Solink, Drew and his team were able to identify a huge issue, and could easily collect all of the evidence within a few clicks.
Says Drew: “We had an employee who was voiding cash sales, taking the money from the drawer, and pocketing it. That theft investigation would have normally taken us days to scan through the video to identify any instances where this happened. With Solink, we were able to find the theft and isolate all the video needed, and send it to the law enforcement officers in just a few hours. Instead of spending days scouring video, we were able to identify everything in a much shorter time frame. That was within a week or two of getting Solink!”
Solink is a huge time-saver for managers
Drew recognizes that the store managers can’t be everywhere at once. Now that they have Solink’s remote monitoring system, they no longer have to worry about missing anything when they’re offsite.
“Now that we have Solink, managers can search for a transaction easily and are instantly presented with the related video.”
“Before Solink, employee theft was not as easy to identify,” explains Drew. “There are only so many hours in a day and store managers have a lot to do. Our old system could give them a basic report of voids or returns that a cashier is performing, but the managers didn’t have the time to go through all of the videos to find those specific transactions to see what happened.
“Now that we have Solink, managers can search for a transaction easily and are instantly presented with the related video. Being able to view the clip of the employee voiding cash sales quickly without having to scrub through weeks of footage really made the difference in discovering–and resolving–any issues.”
Solink is more than a loss prevention system
Like many experienced IT directors, Drew knows that there are a lot of loss prevention platforms that claim to be the perfect solution. But once he saw what Solink had to offer, he knew that it was actually leading the pack.
“Honestly, I was pretty skeptical at first. I figured it would be a pretty typical sales pitch that wouldn’t really peak our interest too much. But when I saw the demo and how Solink had the ability to integrate our transactions with the video in a text format, turning it into a searchable database…well, that was about all I needed to see,” says Drew.
“Solink put together a demo video for me with all the features like the searchable and reportable transaction details, along with other features like the Events page, Heatmapping, and Motion Search. I presented that demo to ownership. Just like me, they were very impressed right away.”
Solink is the consistent solution to unpredictable problems
When Drew realized that a certain glitch in his POS system was causing the stores to lose important transaction information, he was able to find a way to use Solink to fix it.
“Solink has helped in more ways than expected. For example: we have an unfortunate glitch in the point of sale that erases the most recent transaction if power goes out. Now that we have Solink, we can use the video to find the missing product. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, Solink helps recover that transaction.”
Empowering managers to find and resolve issues fast
Drew understands the value of having all of your tools in one platform. He loves that Solink has all of the features he needs to help his store managers uncover the truth about anything from theft to property damage.
“Solink is a very useful tool for getting store management the ability to identify weaknesses without investing a whole lot of time.”
“Being able to search voids, refunds, excessive returns, easily identifying that stuff is such a time saver for our location and store managers. The benefits are not just from a technical standpoint. There is loss prevention, there’s managing the staff, and being able to easily identify property theft.
“Solink is a very useful tool for getting store management the ability to identify weaknesses without investing a whole lot of time.
“Features like Motion Search have helped us significantly. For example, one of our sites has a metal bench outside the door, and at sometime during the night that bench got smashed. The store manager used Region Select to identify exactly when that happened. It turned out that the company we hired to sweep our parking lots hit the bench with their street sweeper. We figured it out fast and were able to resolve it without having to scroll through hours of data.”
1 or 1000 locations? No problem.
Even though Drew manages the IT implementation of all of the Bottle King locations across the country, he wasn’t worried about how his managers would react to Solink. He was excited to show them how it was going to make their lives easier and save them time.
“When we rolled out Solink to all of the locations, one of the things that we recommended to the store managers was to create these specific filters and save them as a report that you can run whenever you want. These filters make it easy to look for events like voids, suspect transactions, and even transactions that include high-risk items that are often purchased with stolen credit cards.
“We used Solink to create specific filters for managers to use and reminded them to run them on a somewhat regular basis. Store managers also use their own custom filters to monitor a specific product, registers, or event in a transaction. Whatever they want to search, they can. The managers are able to upload clips of incidents into the cloud to share with law enforcement or upper management easily, all within a couple of clicks.”
The value of easy uploads extends past law enforcement
Not only can the store managers monitor their daily transactions, but this video surveillance footage can be used to help them solve other software issues. Having the POS integrated with Solink makes it easy to correct and monitor any glitches or issues.
“Solink is not only a great loss prevention platform, but it’s also our go-to day-to-day support platform.”
“We use Solink’s ability to save and export video for more than just loss prevention. If I’m having a problem with the point of sale system, and need to extract video for my software company in order for them to address a certain issue I can do that without any hassle. I can find it very quickly using the search function and send it directly to their email. Solink is not only a great loss prevention platform, but it’s also our go-to day-to-day support platform.
Catching employee theft deters further thieves
You want to be able to trust your employees, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Drew finds that by letting their employees know how easy it is for the management to track transactions, they are able to cut down on employee theft.
“As the employees realized we could monitor the transactions easily, it was almost like they realized, ‘Hey there’s no way we’re going to get away with this.’ It keeps them a little bit more honest when they know we can see those red flags instantly.
“Once you see a couple of your coworkers being taken out in cuffs, it makes you think twice about dipping into the register or intentionally ringing in products cheaper than what you’re buying.”
Choosing Solink: “It’s a no brainer.”
Drew shared a final piece of advice for other companies that may be considering installing Solink.
“Solink is an extremely useful tool for loss prevention. Any company that takes loss prevention seriously should consider implementing Solink. It’s a no brainer.”
