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Julie Standridge | March 7, 2024 |
Get to know some of the best and brightest at Revel Systems® in our recurring “People POS” question-and-answer series. Our previous spotlight featured Kotryna Anilionyte, a talent acquisition specialist based at our European headquarters in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Revel’s Marketing Communications Manager Julie Standridge is back with another chance to spotlight a talented Revel colleague. This time around, she’s chatting with Josh Starkey, a professional services consultant who works directly with enterprise clients as they embark on their journey with Revel’s leading order management platform.
Josh enjoys getting to spend his days putting Revel’s robust features and functionality to work for our clients, and helping them explore innovative, cost-saving, and simplified ways to run their businesses. We hope you enjoy getting to know Josh in this post as much as his colleagues and clients enjoy working with him.
(Q): Josh, thanks for chatting with me today. I can’t believe you’ve already been with Revel for two and a half years—time flies! Let’s take a step back and dive into some of your earlier career experiences that led you to Revel.
(A): I always say that every job I’ve ever had—even college classes—has helped get me where I am today. It may not have been from the beginning that I knew I wanted to be in this type of position. In fact, I don't even think I knew this profession existed! In college I was interested in journalism, but it was at the same time that newspapers were really folding. I was also passionate about foreign languages and one of my majors ended up being in Spanish, which played an important role in helping me land some of my first roles out of college.
One of my minors was economics as well, and I first went to work for a major financial institution after college where I developed a lot of the client-facing skills I still put into practice today. I was later headhunted by another major financial institution and went to work in implementations there. However, it was much different than my role at Revel today. If you can believe it, we wore suits!
I was later hired at a technology company through a connection of a good friend. I had always heard about this company as being a big employer, and I stayed in the implementation world there. I was eventually impacted by layoffs when 75% of my department was let go. That’s when I fortunately landed at Revel.
(Q): We are so glad you’re here! Now, let’s dig into your day-to-day role at Revel. I know you work very closely with our newest clients, but what exactly does that entail?
(A): I work with our enterprise clients who have service agreements with us for many establishments. I help get them fully onboarded with Revel’s technology, which includes configuration, menu building, working with the third-party integrations they want to utilize, and making sure everything is compatible. I also provide go-live support onsite, and sometimes remotely. It’s a very dynamic role and it keeps me on my toes.
(Q): What Revel teams do you interface with the most in order to be successful in your role, and as a result, helpful to our clients?
(A): Internally, I have the chance to work with so many business units to make sure our client needs are being addressed and that they feel completely comfortable with our technology.
At Revel, there is a ton of cross-collaboration with different business units. I get the chance to work closely with our product team and get to sit on their sprints as an advisor. On those sprints, I get to speak to some of the paint points of our clients and advocate for those changes within our platform. I think this is one of Revel’s really biggest strengths as an organization—if you have an idea for a positive change for our clients, our team works hard to address it head on.
An enterprise client recently expressed interest in some additional features for our kitchen display system (KDS) and I got to be their advocate internally. We also have some table service enhancements coming out within our next product release, and I’m so excited to see the impact that this new functionality will have on our table service clients.
I’ve been consistently impressed with the speed at which Revel’s product engineering team can ingest the feedback that I share with them and turn it into actionable functionality for our clients. I definitely think that speed and sense of urgency is something unique to Revel.
(Q): As someone who works very closely with our product, I have to assume you have some favorite features that you are passionate about sharing with clients when they’re a fit for their businesses. What are those?
(A): Our pickup workflow within our kitchen display system (KDS) is very impressive and efficient. I recently had the chance to go and shadow an enterprise client’s operations and noticed that they weren’t taking advantage of Revel’s KDS. I saw how busy their lobbies were getting with people waiting to pick up orders and immediately knew that the KDS could help automate the customer pick up process.
It offers order accuracy, automation, and a more efficient way to communicate with guests. It’s all on one screen, you don’t have to go to five different places. It’s huge!
(Q): In your role, I’m sure there are challenges that you have to overcome on a daily basis. What do those challenges look like, and how do you tackle them?
(A): No two clients are the same. It allows my team to really be creative and put on our critical thinking hats. That creativity is fostered at Revel by leadership, and it makes me passionate about helping our clients enhance their day-to-day operations.
I always tell my clients that there are multiple ways to set things up at the beginning of our calls. Do you want to mirror the way you were doing the process in your previous point of sale? Do you want to eliminate button pushes? Do you want to automate certain processes and keep others more manual?
Every client comes to us with different needs, and that’s the challenge that I really love. This offers an upfront challenge to decide what’s best for their operations, but ultimately a really big opportunity for clients. What’s great is that Revel allows for those differences.
(Q): You’ve been at Revel for two and half years, with many great years ahead of you. What factors have kept you at Revel and kept you passionate about your role?
(A): It’s our people, our team—we just work so well together. Our leadership team goes to bat for us too. And in my role, it’s also our clients. I love when a client tells me something like “what you just turned on is going to save us hours each week.” That’s so fulfilling.
I also love the type of people I get to interact with when onsite with clients. I’ve found that people in the restaurant and retail industries are so open, kind, and hardworking. They leave a positive mark on me and I always hope I’m able to do the same.
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