Retailers are still reporting issues with their National Lottery terminals, following the technology upgrade rolled out by Allwyn earlier this month.
In the days following the roll-out, some suggested the new system looked outdated, as well as reporting other issues with certain elements of either the upgrade or new devices.
More than two weeks on from the upgrade, retailers are reporting that their systems have been causing problems, with some reporting issues for many days, missing the opportunity to sell tickets for long stretches.
A comment posted by Ayton Village Shop said: ”My new terminal still down after a week and still no timescales for it being sorted.”
On the same day, a customer who was looking to purchase a ticket was left in need, and left us a message. He said: “After reading your article on the outages for the National Lottery, I’ve been to multiple shops, and we’re now five days on, and I still can’t buy a lottery ticket. Multiple shops still can’t provide tickets and one of them has the new terminal installed.”
Back with retailers, Mark Staples was one of several who complained that the hotline set up to respond to retailer issues was near impossible to get a response from. “We followed the instructions to the letter and came into store Monday morning only to find that we couldn’t log on,” he said.
“This has been a very unpleasant situation. I’m very angry.”
“We called the lottery hotline, held on for over two hours with no reply and finally spoke to someone on Tuesday - only to be told our terminal has not been upgraded but he didn’t know why. By Thursday we were still not able to provide the lottery as a service as we were waiting for either a phonecall or an engineer. This has been a very unpleasant situation. I’m very angry.”
Also angry was Spar retailer Susan Connolly (left), who responded directly to Allwyn’s response to the issues on our website. “Nice article for Allwyn - but they’ve completely ignored everything that’s been said by retailers since the upgrade. I’m glad 39,000 people got through on the phone as we couldn’t and still can’t. [There’s] not enough margin in lottery sales to deal with all the issues we have now.”
One further retailer expressed concerns about the problems they had had with the phoneline too, as well as some technical problems. “I thought I’d let you know that the big switchover by the National Lottery has been a complete disaster.
“The tickets printing out from the new terminal won’t scan on the shop scanner, and also when trying to scan a winning ticket on the new terminal it’s causing lots of problems. It’s obvious these terminals were not properly tested before the big roll out of installations. When you try and phone the helpline it can take over an hour to get through, and this needs highlighting.”
Retailer Dee Sedani (right) added: “My terminal is up and running with no issues. The only problem I have is that my Epos will no longer scan the barcode that’s printed as it’s smaller and not very clear, so the Epos sometimes picks it up but nine times out 10 it will not.”
While the glitches do seem to now be fading away, Dee added on Thursday 14 August that he’s not out of the woods yet. ”The situation is still hit and miss. Direct debits were either wrong or didn’t go out yesterday, and invoices via email didn’t come out either,” he said in an update.
Allwyn responds…
When presented with the above comments from Convenience Store readers, an Allwyn spokesperson went to lengths to answer each point: “This was the biggest tech upgrade since The National Lottery first launched in 1994 and, arguably, the biggest lottery transformation anywhere in the world.
“Thanks to the support from our 43,500 retail partners, we were able to get all the systems back up and running several hours ahead of schedule. We always said that we expected that a small proportion of legacy Altura terminals may experience delays coming back up for various reasons – including some that didn’t download the new software successfully.
“We’re continuing to help a small number of retailers with any residual issues, such as logging on and resetting passwords - with wait times on our hotline now under two minutes. This is a short-term solution until we’re able to get the new Wave terminals out to all retailers over the next few months, with the rollout of those starting at scale from this week.
“As always, we’re extremely grateful to our retail partners for their support during this once-in-a-generation upgrade.”
Allwyn also notes that – as most retailers can attest - the legacy systems and terminals date back to 2009 and were/are in desperate need of an upgrade. It also points out that the vast majority them of retailers were back selling tickets in good time, greatly helped by them following the guidance provided.
With over 8,000 retailers now on the new state-of-the-art Wave terminals - and with the rollout of those starting at scale to the remainder of the estate this week - some retailers still on the legacy Altura terminals experienced some anticipated teething problems.
If the new software didn’t download successfully on an Altura terminal and Allwyn couldn’t fix it remotely, they have advised it would’ve resulted in an engineer visit to get them back online. These visits have taken place now, ad Allwyn have assured us there are colleagues urgently looking into Ayton Village Shop’s report.
With regards to terminal logins, Allwyn says it has now given its hotline agents the ability to unlock the terminal instantly if a retailer has locked themselves out.
Regarding payment, Allwyn adds that some weekly direct debits have not been processed as anticipated this week and will “be in touch with retailers shortly with an update on when payment will be taken.”
Weekly invoices can continue to be accessed and printed manually on the terminal and will no longer print automatically on Sundays. Invoices were only emailed to stores with an Altura terminal as a temporary measure over technical switchover weekend.
More generally, Allwyn suggests some retailers are still getting to grips with how the new software looks and performs on their existing Altura and says “this is expected when there is any change to new hardware or systems in any walk of life.
“A huge amount of work went into getting retailers ready for this – with a series of training materials on our Retailer Training Centre. These training materials are still available and include a module where retailers can learn about and try out core functions of the new software,” it adds.
Finally, any retailers experiencing residual issues are more than welcome to share store details with Convenience Store, with Allwyn promising a timely follow-up call or visit.
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