Catch The Fire Steps into the Future with Digital Touchpoints
After successfully modernizing the Attwell Books bookstore with Armodilo kiosks, Catch The Fire finds all-around engagement increasing as they deploy more Armodilo tablet enclosures.
With 19 churches located in 8 countries, worldwide missions, a training college with international campuses, a YouTube channel with over 23,000 subscribers, and one of Toronto’s oldest independent Christian bookstores, Catch The Fire is a ministry that has been sharing its values, developing communities and transforming lives around the world for over 20 years.
Although Catch The FIre is a worldwide family of churches, their original location and headquarters are in Toronto, the home of a large auditorium and meeting place, as well as Attwell Books, a full-scale, first-party publishing house and bookstore serving both the local church and the general public.
Attwell Books has integrated music listening stations in their full-service cultural bookstore since they opened, but could only make music listening stations available to their customers using dedicated CD listening stations that were starting to look and feel out-of-date.
The ideal solution would be user friendly, intuitive, and welcoming. “Christian bookstores, by and large, are pretty old school in most of what they do. I started looking at all the things we were doing. One of the biggest pains was people wanting to listen to music. They're buying physical CDs in our store, and they want to be able to listen to a lot of that music. So we used these old CD listening stations that could have a maximum of 3 CDs in them, but if you wanted to demo nine different CDs, you had to have three stations,” said Jonathan Puddle, Director of Publishing and Retail.
Reclaim floor space, sample music and retain a familiar feel
Attwell Books wanted to make it easier for customers to sample the full range of music they had available while reclaiming floor space to display more products, while retaining a user interface with which customers would be familiar.
Although he had been researching interactive kiosk solutions as early as 2010, it wasn’t until 2013 when Puddle finally decided to replace the antiquated CD listening stations with iPads using iTunes to browse the entire collection of music on offer.
Even with few kiosk solutions available, Puddle was convinced that the iPad was the best solution for his customers, and even went so far as to secure the music listening tablets to a table with gaffer tape while sourcing a kiosk solution.
Tablet stands that are robust and look even better in-store
After a series of delays and red flags when trying to work with an offshore manufacturing company, Puddle found the perfect solution in the Armodilo Floor.
“This is exactly the kind of product I’m looking for, and it looks so much nicer in the store,” said Puddle, “the value add is recognizable immediately in terms of how clean and tidy they are, how my customers respond to it, [saying] ‘Look how modern and nice your store is. Wow, you don't look like you belong in the ’80s’.”
The decision to incorporate Armodilo kiosks impressed the customers at Attwell Books so much that in 2015, Puddle made the decision to take the whole customer experience to the next level by modernizing the store with a tablet-powered point of sale system, with a key factor being the ability to swivel the tablet around so customers could add digital signatures or type in their information. It didn’t take long before he realized the Armodilo Sphere was the perfect solution.
“Literally, in five minutes on Armodilo’s site and I found exactly the product that fit my needs,” said Puddle, “the Sphere is the one we’re using at the point of sale. So those are sitting on our table tops, and they look so clean and nice. We used to have a full desktop sitting there and cash drawers and everything. Now we've hidden the cash drawers away, and just have these things sitting on a black tabletop, and everyone says, ‘Oh, what are you doing? That looks nice’.”
Tablet Kiosks - The Future of Retail
With Floor kiosks acting as efficient music listening stations while saving space, and with the Sphere helping speed up the point of sale process, Puddle has re-invigorated the customer experience at Catch The Fire and Attwell Books, and the future looks even better.
Puddle’s colleagues at Catch The FIre regularly use the Armodilo Floor to collect e-mail addresses at conferences, and when one of Catch The FIre’s churches recently installed a coffee shop in the back of a new building, the Armodilo Sphere helped them get a point of sale system up and running in just three days. Puddle now sees Armodilo at the centre of his ministry’s growth and engagement.
“Churches are using kiosks now for people to give offerings and donations, and that’s an area where churches don’t see a lot of innovation – just pass a bucket and hope people put money in,” said Puddle, “but it’s 2016. I don’t carry cash, and I don’t even know where my check book is. Even at a church, 80% of your people have used an iPad before and don’t even have to think about them, and the most functional, best all-around physical framework solution is an Armodilo Kiosk.”
