Kiosk deployments are continuing to grow in numbers; however, many executives are surprised to learn about the challenges that emerge as deployments grow. They face complaints about out-of-control service costs, as well as out-of-date kiosk hardware, software and applications. They also wonder why the company is not doing more with the data it is gathering. One solution to those issues is remote-management software. With it, deployers can transition their proven kiosk pilot programs into successful large-scale rollouts intelligently and avoid the frustrations common to merely trying to replicate pilot programs into more locations.
Customer data
As the size of a kiosk deployment grows, so does the value of the customer data. Every time customers touch the screen, you've successfully invited them to engage in a dialogue. They're informing you about how much they want to spend, the products they're interested in, the promotions they're disinterested in, the time of day they frequent the store, their customer-profile demographics, and so on. The life of every salesperson and marketing person becomes easier if this information is timely and available in a comprehensible manner. This information must be presented such that it demonstrates consumer insight and relevance.
When choosing software for this data collection, make sure the supplier understands your business, products and marketing decisions, one that outputs tailored data reports rather than generic, out-of-the-box standard reports.
Managing updates
Over time, everything changes, even with kiosks. Hardware ages, operating systems reach their end of life, and customers demand better usability, shorter wait times and more convenience. The list goes on. After a few years, it's easy to have a variety of different kiosk models with inconsistent software versions, clients who can't reliably upgrade software on each kiosk, and a support team that's burdened with maintaining different versions of hardware and software.
Content delivery is not an issue with short term pilots. With full deployment, however, content delivery infrastructure reduces the overhead costs of supporting many kiosk versions. A remote management platform that enables the support team to upload and distribute OS patches, software updates and promotions with a click of a button saves hours of tedious support time normally spent tracking, updating and troubleshooting kiosk environments, and allows the marketing teams to quickly roll out new campaigns.
Service automation
Service requirements vary the most between pilots and larger deployments. Pilots are typically located in a single city with experienced resources monitoring their status. Even with the use of regionally located service technicians, this support model is expensive to replicate at scale. Service visits are required for physical problems, but a $200 service call is an expensive way to resolve simple tasks that could be resolved with a reboot, remote troubleshooting or self-healing rules. What's worse, an "out-of-order kiosk" signals to consumers that the self-service system is faulty and unreliable. In fact, 40 percent of customers surveyed for the 2009 Self-Service Consumer Survey, published by this website, reported that the quality of service was most important to them when dealing with a self-service application.
A predictive and proactive support team vastly outperforms a reactive, dispatch-based support team. The key difference between the two is an intelligent monitoring system that can address failures as soon as they occur, before customers are affected. Intelligent monitoring allows support experts to remotely monitor, diagnose and resolve many issues before anyone actually complains. Furthermore, by analyzing the data, support teams can develop proactive systems and predict, and in many cases avoid, future failures.
Enterprise system integration
During a pilot, kiosks typically are not integrated into other corporate systems. On their own, they sit in disparate locations around the country. As the kiosk program becomes more mature, there are typically two key connection points that need to be planned. Kiosk usage business data is often combined with other business datasets, such as Web-traffic trend data and sales data. In addition, kiosk monitoring data is often considered when opening and closing helpdesk-tickets in internal service and support systems. Since it is usually just a matter of time before integration between kiosks and internal systems becomes crucial, it is important to evaluate extensibility and openness when implementing a remote management system for long term deployments.
While many departments grow organically and develop some of these capabilities internally over time, it's more efficient and cost-effective for companies to license a single management platform, rather than developing a management platform internally. The centralized remote monitoring of kiosk deployments is one of the most effective ways to cut costs and boost ROI of full kiosk deployments.
The writer is director of application solutions at Esprida Corp., a provider of SaaS remote management for self-service kiosks.
