How an award tip-off really paid off: LamasaTech
Digital signage and touch screen technology expert LamasaTech successfully pivoted its business during the pandemic to cope with changing customer demands.
Its innovative approach secured a prestigious award that continues to strengthen the company’s international reputation and growth today. Head of Marketing Kirsty Byers explains the crucial part The Business Factory played in their story…
We’re a world-leading provider of digital kiosks and displays.
It’s our mission to enhance customer experiences and interactions through innovative technology. Our global customer base includes major brands such as Costa Coffee, Yamaha Motor Corp, The Houses of Parliament and the Million Dollar Round Table. We’re based at North Tyne Industrial Estate in Benton where all of our design work takes place, our warehousing, quality control, sales & marketing, system set ups and our customer support. The Business Factory has been by our side every step of the way as we’ve grown.
When the pandemic hit and the hospitality and retail sector contracted, we realised we needed to adapt quickly to withstand a drop in demand for our existing products.
We identified an opportunity to help other businesses remain open and reassure their staff and customers that they were safe. We reacted quickly, modifying our existing self-service kiosks that are a feature in places such as school and business reception areas to include a temperature scanner and non-touch functionality. This all-in-one temperature-measuring and sign-in solution helped employers and service providers to identify potentially infected individuals and helped reduce the spread of the virus.
There was unprecedented demand for the product!
We were early market adopters of the technology, which allowed us to capture the market. Our customer base grew exponentially and the innovation opened new geographic markets to us. The greatest demand came from North America.
Since returning to normality post-Covid, we’ve worked with customers to repurpose their product again.
This means they can continue to get maximum value from their investment for their business. Now we provide a full visitor management system that allows our customers’ visitors, staff and contractors to enter their building quickly. It also allows our clients to monitor who is signed in to their facilities and generate timesheets showing how long each employee or contractor has been signed in, to help with payroll.
The Business Factory reached out to us to encourage us to maximise awareness of our innovation success.
We’ve worked closely with the team over a number of years on everything from helping to find premises to accessing expert innovation consultancy. We’ve built a strong relationship and they know us well. They recognised that the way we pivoted the business during the pandemic would make us a good fit for the innovation category in the North Tyneside Business Awards.
This wasn’t something we would have done otherwise.
We didn’t even know the awards existed so we were grateful for the suggestion and were even more delighted to win! Innovation is at the heart of everything we do so to be recognised for this was fantastic and the impact has been major.
Winning the award has helped to build the trust factor in our products and our company.
We promote our award-winning status on our website and even in our email signatures. When we’re reaching out to new clients, we can demonstrate our history of success and the stamp of approval we have from the business community. It definitely translates into new business. The publicity of winning the award also helped to spread the word about LamasaTech.
When you’re busy running a business, it can be easy to take for granted the support that’s out there. But as our experience proves, it really pays to utilise it.
As a 14-year-old business, we’re pretty well established and have lots of experience to draw on. But as we grow, we can’t afford to overlook opportunities and ideas others can support us with. The beauty of the Business Factory is that the support offer is so wide-ranging, it fits to whatever your business needs at the time.
The personal relationships we’ve built are what makes the support from The Business Factory really stand out.
Having someone external who cares about your business and is an advocate for what you do is a really powerful thing. As well as responding to our requests for help, the team proactively reaches out to us to make us aware of opportunities and suggestions that might benefit our business.
Has Kirsty's story got you thinking?
Find out how we can help your business by calling us on 0191 643 6409 or drop us an email on info@businessnorthtyneside.co.uk
