Playing a significant role in transforming your workplace is an exciting possibility. When Sebastien Pedraglio joined Royal Photo, the rental department was in its infancy and lacked proper organization and management. Six years later, it is thriving, and everything is managed from within Booqable, adapting as new improvements and features are released.
It’s not uncommon for a camera store to have a rental operation within its structure. Therefore, it makes sense to serve enthusiasts looking to buy their next camera or accessory, while also serving more casual or project-based customers who only need equipment for a short period.
Royal Photo
In 2015, Sebastien joined Royal Photo, a camera store, with the challenge of developing its then-new rental department. The store aims to be an all-in-one service wherein, on one visit, you can purchase a memory card, grab a lens that you’ve rented and leave your laptop for a check-up.
However, in the early days of the rental side of the business, it was difficult to serve and process customers. Sales staff would create a quote on paper from a phone or email booking and file them away. This proved to be impractical, and they knew there had to be a better way. So, they hired Sebastien to develop the department into a more organized operation.
His first project was to find a rental system that could act as a POS for the sales staff to process rentals. In his briefing, he knew they had to be able to create, manage and fulfill orders in-store and accept bookings online. This task led him to various pieces of rental software, and he had to weigh up the options as a lot was riding on this decision.
Falling in love
While making his usual comparisons between the different rental software available, one night, he came across Booqable. He immediately fell in love with the simplicity, features, and what he would achieve with the software. But, most importantly, it met one of his biggest targets for his first year at Royal Photo, to find a way for customers to book directly.
With Booqable, he was able to provide sales staff with a POS system that instantly fulfilled the requirements set out. They can now look up orders for customers picking up rentals and create new orders for walk-in customers without having to write anything down. Worrying about availability is also a thing of the past as it is automatically accounted for.
More productivity
Sebastien believes that if he had not found Booqable, the sales staff would most likely have continued as they were or used Google Sheets to track bookings. He has been able to increase the team’s productivity and give them the ability to prepare orders in advance. In addition, online bookings have saved them a lot of time lost on processing orders manually.
The Royal photo rental department has grown alongside Booqable and adapted its workflow to new features. For example, real-time availability introduced a whole new aspect of the customer experience and allowed them to confirm availability without calling or emailing the store. Sebastien is looking forward to the new developments that are on the way.
