Every EPOS provider claims to offer great support. Almost none of them publish the numbers behind that claim, because most of the time the numbers don't hold up. These do.
1. Real 24/7/365 support, not a ticket queue
Support is available every hour of every day of the year, and it's answered by an actual person, not a chatbot reading from a script or a portal that logs a ticket for "someone" to look at eventually. A venue doesn't stop trading at 6pm on a Friday, so the team backing its EPOS shouldn't either. That matters most at exactly the moments a support desk with office hours is least useful — a Sunday brunch rush, a bank holiday, or the last hour of service on New Year's Eve, when a ticket queued for "the next business day" simply isn't an answer.
2. Calls answered in under 10 seconds
When a till goes down mid-service, the last thing a manager needs is hold music. The average call to HDS Cloud Apps support is answered in under 10 seconds — fast enough that "call support" is genuinely the quickest way to fix a problem, not a last resort after ten minutes of trying to fix it yourself. Most EPOS providers don't publish this number at all, which is usually a sign it wouldn't help their case if they did.
3. A one-hour SLA on anything software-related
Every software issue carries a one-hour service level agreement. That's a contractual guarantee, not a target that quietly slips when the support queue gets busy — and it applies to every customer on the platform, whatever their contract size or trading volume. New customers are also assigned an account manager rather than being routed to a different name every time they call, so a follow-up conversation doesn't start from scratch explaining the same context twice.
4. 48-hour hardware replacement, UK and Europe
Hardware fails eventually — it's physical equipment on a busy counter, not a hypothetical. Where warranty cover is in place, a faulty terminal, printer or cash drawer is replaced within 48 hours anywhere in the UK or Europe. In practice it's often faster, but the guarantee is the part a business can actually plan around, rather than being left guessing how long a single point of failure will keep costing them sales.
5. 17,800 updates in 8 years
The platform doesn't sit still waiting for an annual release cycle. Over 8 years of operation, HDS Cloud Apps has shipped more than 17,800 updates — that works out to roughly 2,225 a year, 42 a week, or 8 a day. Most of those changes are small: a fix, a refinement, a feature request from a real customer conversation. The scale only becomes obvious when you add it up.
A platform that ships constantly is a platform that's still listening. New features, tweaks and fixes arrive from customer feedback rather than a rigid roadmap set months in advance — so a problem a venue raises this week doesn't sit in a backlog for the next major release.
6 & 7. Always live — auto-scaling Google Cloud hosting, no downtime
HDS Cloud Apps runs on Google Cloud with auto-scaling infrastructure, and the platform has not gone offline in over eight years of operation — 99.999% uptime since day one. Auto-scaling also means there's no slow period when trade spikes: a Saturday night rush, a bank holiday, or a stadium concourse at half-time all get the same performance as a quiet Tuesday afternoon, because the infrastructure scales with demand automatically rather than being sized for an average day.
8 & 9. Built by people who've worked in this industry — and who care about every customer
A lot of hospitality software is built by engineers who have never worked a Friday night service, and it shows in the small frictions that never quite get fixed. HDS Cloud Apps is built by people who've worked in the industry it now serves, which changes what gets prioritised and how quickly an awkward workflow gets noticed in the first place.
That same mindset extends to who gets treated as worth caring about. Every customer gets the same one-hour SLA, the same 48-hour hardware guarantee and the same real person answering the phone in under 10 seconds — regardless of whether they're running one till or fifty, and regardless of transaction volume. Retention isn't built by looking after the biggest accounts and hoping everyone else stays out of inertia; it's built by not giving anyone a reason to leave in the first place.
The real metric that matters
Any EPOS provider can point to new sign-ups. Far fewer can point to customers who've stayed for years, through updates, through busy seasons, through the occasional hardware fault — and still recommend the platform to the next venue down the street. That's what these numbers are actually measuring. Not how good the demo looks, but what happens after the contract is signed and the till is genuinely part of how a business runs.
If your current EPOS provider can't tell you their average call answer time, their software SLA, or how long a hardware replacement actually takes, that's usually the answer in itself. Get a FREE demo and see what a platform built around retention — not just acquisition — actually feels like day to day.