A town square sprang up Tuesday in the middle of a hotel ballroom, complete with a bank, a grocery store and a hamburger joint.
The stage-worthy set at the Denver Marriott South wasn’t built for a movie shoot, but for Colorado’s largest public company, First Data Corp., to use as it demonstrates its diverse technologies to employees.
“While employees understand customers and products in their own unit, they very rarely understand the products, customers and services of other business units,” said Myron Beard, the senior vice president of First Data’s new Sales Institute.
Greenwood Village-based First Data, the world’s largest credit-card processor and money-transfer provider, has plenty of units for its 33,000 employees, including 3,000 in Denver, to learn about.
At the Fancy Burger, for example, John Cawthorne described the “loyalty cards” First Data is developing so even small merchants can reward customers.
Across the street at the Town Bank, trainer Chuck Gidaro demonstrated an automated teller machine that can store information about the language, receipts and withdrawal amounts each user prefers.
Inside the Big Box Superstore, Scott Petersen explained a “point-of-sale” terminal that encourages debit-card users to punch in a personal identification number, a move that is less expensive for merchants than the use of a signature.
Next door at Grover’s Grocery, trainer Octavio Gonzalez kept busy spitting out money orders on Western Union’s FDX 400.
First Data employee Michelle Mahoney said she learned things she hadn’t picked up in nearly five years at the company.
“I was around a point-of-sale terminal and didn’t spend any money,” she joked.
Between 500 to 600 First Data employees came through the exhibit on Tuesday, estimated Betty Ennis, a director at the Sales Institute.
Another 120 sales representatives from throughout the country are expected to come through the “Town Square Mall” today as part of their sales training.
It is another form of teaching the company expects to take on the road in January, said Beard, who came up with the concept.
The mall training is combined with online and in-person seminars to encourage selling across different business lines.
But the mall also offers a way to concretely explain what the company is about, something First Data employees sometimes struggle with.
“They can go home at the end of the day and talk to their kids and say, ‘See this ATM with a Star logo. This ATM machine is ours,”‘ Beard said.
Staff writer Aldo Svaldi can be reached at 303-820-1410 or asvaldi@denverpost.com.
