Battle-Tested

Jon Corto and Tyler Cater, of Buffalo Strive Vending, talk with Neil Swindale and Greg Elisara about nearly three years running ZippyAssist.

Burned Before

Jon didn't arrive at that verdict casually. Ask any operator who's been in the industry long enough, and they'll tell you the same thing he told us.

"I think every operator that's been around for a long time has been burned by this or that. They go out with the latest and greatest, and then they realize that maybe it hasn't been battle-tested." — Jon Corto, Owner, Buffalo Strive Vending

It's a fair question for any operator to ask, and it's one Buffalo Strive had to answer for themselves before signing on: every new platform is another line item, another integration, another thing that has to actually work instead of just demo well. Jon was, in his own words, one of the skeptical ones.

"I was probably one of those skeptical operators because I've been burned a few times, but it has really proven to be a godsend." — Jon Corto

That's the whole verdict in two sentences. Everything below is what got him there.

ROI From the First Sticker

For an operator who'd been burned before, the test wasn't just whether ZippyAssist worked — it was whether getting there would be its own headache. According to GM Tyler, it wasn't.

"I thought it was pretty simple for us. You made it very easy implementation-wise on the back end to get all our machines pulled over. The way things integrated with VendSys helped a lot. It was an easy setup to get all our assets in there, and then once we had the stickers and pre-made them, we just assigned service techs or drivers to put them on machines. There was not a lot of friction to get it up and going, and the benefits were almost instant." — Tyler, General Manager, Buffalo Strive Vending

Jon's shorthand for the whole rollout is even more direct:

"If you can put a sticker on a machine, you could get up and running with ZippyAssist. It's that easy." — Jon Corto

And the payoff wasn't something Buffalo Strive had to wait months to see. It started showing up in the small, constant costs that had just been part of doing business — like writing checks for fifty-cent refunds.

"Not to be bogged down with writing checks for 50 cents — the cost of just that alone pays for itself." — Jon Corto

Getting a ZippyAssist sticker on a machine translates into less calls, less admin, less work, and happier customers. Multiply that across a growing fleet, and the case for ZippyAssist made itself before the bigger numbers ever came into it.

The Calls That Stopped Coming

The clearest proof point, three years on, is what stopped happening. Buffalo Strive's customer service lead, Ella, used to be the first line of defense for every refund complaint. Now:

"As big as our company has gotten, our calls have been reduced to almost nothing. We don't get a ton of inbound calls because Zippy's handling it... Ella, who does our customer service here, gets a couple of calls a day at most." — Jon Corto

For Tyler, the change was even more personal. Before ZippyAssist, after-hours calls followed him home.

"After weekday business hours and on the weekend, those calls to the office transferred to my cell phone. I was guaranteed three, four phone calls a weekend about refunds — that's very minimum." — Tyler

Why does a couple of dollars in refunds matter enough to fix properly? Jon put it in terms of the customer relationship, not the transaction:

"You've got the same customers, right? So you really have to make them happy. To have a disgruntled customer that you could lose them for life just over a refund — that's not something we're looking to do." — Jon Corto

Neil put a number on that logic during the conversation: a customer spending just a few dollars a day, a few days a week, adds up into the thousands over five years — and at the scale of hundreds or thousands of machines, a single unresolved inconvenience is an expensive thing to get wrong.

The Feature Nobody Advertised

Ask Buffalo Strive what's been most valuable, and the answer isn't about refunds. It's what ZippyAssist does for the service techs who have to physically fix the machines.

"To get the photo of the machine with the issue — that alone is a great tool to let your service techs know, hey, I need to bring X, Y and Z to this particular machine, because I can see what's wrong with it. You're almost getting a diagnostics before you arrive on site." — Jon Corto

That matters more than it might sound, because the alternative is a wasted trip.

"If it's out in Lockport, I've got to drive an hour away, and I don't have the right stuff as a service tech. Oh well — I just lost two hours of the day." — Jon Corto

The dispatch side works the same way — automatically, and around the clock.

"You're not waiting for someone that left a voicemail for that to get heard to dispatch a tech. It's automatically going into the service tech call log where they can respond right away — and our response time goes up, and the amount of service calls we complete a day goes up." — Tyler

Tyler is candid that this side of the platform doesn't get talked about as much as the refund feature — even though it's just as important to how Buffalo Strive runs.

"The dashboard allows for that customer service person to have a lot of flexibility, and it also acts as like a dispatch center for our techs. I think that's something that's really not advertised by you guys as much, but I think that is just as valuable as the refund component." — Jon Corto

From Support Tool to Business Intelligence

Nearly three years of data has turned ZippyAssist into more than a way to handle individual complaints — it's become part of how Buffalo Strive makes capital decisions about its own equipment.

"We have a weekly service tech meeting where we kind of go over, hey, this particular machine's been down for a few days. What's going on with it? We can have a discussion about it. You can also see when a machine starts to become a repeat problem — maybe we need to get this off the field, back to the warehouse. Maybe it needs to be refurbished, maybe it needs to just exit Strive entirely and go to the junkyard, and let's get a new asset in there." — Jon Corto

Tyler sees the same pattern from the service-history side:

"The service history — that history of complaints — is very valuable. If it's a recurring problem, either we're not fixing it, or there's bigger action that needs to be taken before it becomes an issue to the customer." — Tyler

Now It's Part of the Pitch

The clearest sign that ZippyAssist earned its place at Buffalo Strive: it's no longer just something they use internally. It's something they sell.

"It is actually in our slides for when we present to a new customer, because that is something that they don't want to deal with. Not a lot of people that are running businesses want to deal with vending refunds or vending problems — that should be on us. A lot of customers are relieved to see that we have a solution for that." — Jon Corto

That relief is often visible in the room, especially from the person who'd otherwise be fielding the complaints themselves.

"A lot of times that gatekeeper is in on these meetings, and so they're just — sigh of relief. Oh, thank you. It's a thank God moment." — Jon Corto

Battle-Tested, Confirmed

Jon Corto isn't an easy sell, and that's exactly why his verdict carries weight. Nearly three years, thousands of transactions, and a lot of stickers later, the platform he was skeptical of going in is the one he now puts in front of his own prospects.

"ZippyAssist, just an awesome tool and we're so happy to have it onboarded." — Jon Corto

Want to see how ZippyAssist works for operators like Buffalo Strive? Book a free demo and talk to our team.

Read how Pepsi Mid-America — a major Pepsi Bottler running thousands of machines and nearly 500 micro markets across five states — built consumer support at scale with ZippyAssist: When Scale Meets Service.