Groupon Updates BreadCrumb POS In Push To CRM

Groupon has rolled out new features for its Breadcrumb point-of-sale (POS) app Wednesday morning, adding Customer Relationship Management (CRM) capabilities to the product. The CRM features give merchants the opportunity to track customers by storing their contact information while analyzing purchase behaviors, helping Groupon connect its emergent POS tech to its marketing business.

The deals giant acquired Breadcrumb in 2012, and this year re-launched the Breadcrumb POS app as a payments app for all local merchants. Since the re-launch, the Chicago-based company has slowly integrated new additions into the app to round out basic functionality including an offline redundancy mode to process transactions when a loss of connectivity occurs.

“The CRM feature makes it possible for merchants to make a grid of their customers that they can sort, filter and navigate in real time,” Varun Krishna, director of product management for Breadcrumb POS told Street Fight. “This is the first step towards really creating a bridge between the merchant and the consumer.”

The CRM system allows business to begin the process of connecting payment and purchase data with the customer lists, which businesses have used for years for email marketing. Customer records are created for every credit card swiped using the system. However, cash payments are not automatically tracked in the Breadcrumb POS app, but merchants can go to their transaction history and assign transactions to a customer’s record.

In addition to the CRM feature, the company also rolled out an employee management tool that allows merchants to set functions for specific employees and assign transactions to individual team members. Business owners can also now use the iPad’s built in cameras to scan barcode SKUs, as well as upload images for each menu item.

The growth of Breadcrumb comes as the company looks expand beyond its core deals business, connecting the dots for local merchants by providing, what the company calls, the “operating system for local commerce.”

“We want to build an operating system with a variety of services that help merchants with any aspect of running their business,” said Krishna. “Today it’s payment and POS, in the future it will be much more exciting with new types of opportunities that make the entire experience for the consumer and merchant more and more seamless.”

Myriah Towner is an intern at Street Fight.