Success story: Laine Pub Company

Founded 27 years ago, the Laine Pub Company has established itself as a prominent player in the pub sector, creating inviting and inspiring pub experiences for their customers across 55 sites in Birmingham, London and Brighton.  

Heading up brand and development for the last three years, Gordon Keen explained what the Laine Pub Company team were looking for in a new EPoS system and how Access’s proven track record with booking and reservation software made them the obvious first choice. 

"We aimed to optimise our conversion rates across all sites, adopting a more sales-driven agenda. Before COVID, we offered numerous monthly discounts without seeing significant impact, prompting us to explore alternatives. Given our prior experience with DesignMyNight, choosing Access felt like the obvious choice." 

Rolling out a new EPoS system across 55 sites is no mean feat, and the Laine team had the perfect opportunity to iron out any initial kinks at the Brighton Spiegeltent event, the largest open access arts festival in England attracting around 300,000 visitors. “[Moving to Access EPoS] it was like day and night with our previous EPoS provider. We took over £1.5m during the six-week period, and lost just 15p, which was incredible.”  The festival trial saw positive results for the pub company’s teams straight away, transforming a previously laborious 2-hour process of cashing up into a simple 15-minute task. And those time savings are now benefitting venue teams across multiple sites, saving hundreds of hours of time. 

"The tangible time-saving aspect is that you no longer need to go to three different places for information, it's all right there on the till. Plus, integrated PDQs, though seemingly minor, mark a significant improvement for us. It's our first time having them, and the speed of service has drastically improved." 

In addition to substantial time savings, Access Hospitality's EPoS system provides more accurate, real-time sales data, enabling better decision making and improving revenue management.  

With a tricky set up behind the scenes, the back-end integration was important to get right, and the Access team supported the adoption over the implementation stage to ensure success:

"Our main challenge was integrating the back-end systems due to our unique management partnership agreement. We run our sites as independent businesses, and they're paid based on sales from the tills.

"We also have franchised kitchens, adding to the complexity. We had weekly calls with Access to ensure seamless communication between systems, critical for accurate payments to managing partners and franchised kitchens. Despite rolling out the new system to five different businesses with their own operators, we encountered minimal complaints leading up to Christmas." 

The integration with Acteol CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software provided by Access has also helped the business work towards their objectives.  

"Bringing Acteol on board as well has really helped us to understand the customer journey, so we have that full circle of engaging the customer right from the start."

The data integration between DesignMyNight bookings, EPoS and Acteol helps the team to really understand their customers, with their in-venue teams knowing from a glance at the till if the customer is new or existing and any booking information.  

Over the last three years, with Access Collins and DesignMyNight bookings and reservations, Laine have improved lost bookings by an incredible £75,000 per year and the next step is building out targeted, personalised marketing campaigns to retain those customers and turn them into loyal return visitors.  

As well as building campaigns based on previous visits or birthdays, for example, the team are excited to use the CRM software to gain better visibility of redemption of specific partners – enhancing their relationships with suppliers who want to know the take up of product offers.  

“Using [Access EPoS] in Brighton has been absolutely great and then utilising Acteol to retarget those customers and say, ‘well you came in or its your birthday why don’t you come to this specific site’ or ‘I’ve noticed you’ve been to these sites; we’ve got this offer on, this is available on this day’.” 

And the team also have plans to optimise marketing activity across other channels too, really helping to connect with their customers and drive more future bookings.  

“What’s really exciting is the ability to set up and target our campaigns through social, which is something that historically is quite labour intensive for us.” 

And Access continues to work closely with the Laine team to ensure they achieve their business objectives, with monthly roadmap planning sessions with their key stakeholders, their Account Manager, Lauren, and their Customer Success Manager, Steph.

“We’re always looking to be leaders in innovation and Steph’s been great from that perspective. We have a nice personable relationship that wasn’t there three years ago when I joined. We’ve really moved forward and the financials of it are testament to that.” 

Benefitting from a wealth of data in one workspace, the team are working towards bespoke data reporting to improve visibility across the business.  

“Having [all the data] in one space and then being able to put it into the workspace – is great… That was basically why we moved so that we could have all that data in one place and have a much better overview of our business.”