Federal Cafe: Maintaining their signature guest experience through growth

Since they opened in 2014, Federal Cafe has become a part of Manchester daily life. Claudio says, “Tourists come to Manchester to come to Federal, and you can go past any of our sites in the city center any day of the week, and there's a big queue outside. There's smiling, there's chatting, there's really good energy.”

Thanks to that good energy, and lots of hard work, they’ve grown naturally across the city, but stayed independent. “We still want each site to feel special, but also cohesive. We focus on the training of the staff and the culture to achieve that.”

To support the kind of service Claudio wanted to offer to his customers, he went looking for the right ePOS for the café. He spoke to other business owners in Manchester, and that’s when he learned about Lightspeed. “I needed a system that could handle speed and flexibility around the cafe.”

Because each Federal location only has one till at the counter, he wanted something super simple and quick for his staff to use, but also powerful when it came to features like reporting. Lightspeed was able to fulfill both of those needs.

“It is clean and intuitive, so everyone can work with it quite fast,” says Claudio of Lightspeed. “It has that simplicity at the front-end, and gives us what we want from the back-end, too.”

“I’ve worked with previous systems, and at the end of the shift, we would spend maybe an hour doing the cash up,” says Claudio. With Lightspeed, he and his team have been able to significantly reduce the time they spend on that daily task. “I would say an hour and a half, twice a day. That's three hours a day, 21 hours a week… that’s a lot of time.”

Claudio also uses Lightspeed’s reporting features to ensure Federal’s efficiency. “I use the real-time reporting to see how much each of our locations are bringing in. And at the end of the day, we don't have to search for a pound here or there, so we save time.”

That clear connection between the reporting and tills is another benefit of Lightspeed. “Things are faster and cleaner, and it removes the chance of mistakes,” Claudio adds.

As Federal Cafe grows and expands into a brand new location in Leeds, Claudio and his team are still focused on delivering that cohesive experience to their customers. He’s also focused on using technology to facilitate those experiences, but finding a balance and keeping it human.

“I think it's about the connection and the community,” says Claudio. “People crave that connection when they come in. So we're designing spaces where people can come in and just be hit with human connection. That's what people will still want. They want warmth.”