For companies deploying self-service, the experience can be an exhilarating one — here are new technologies that promise to do great things, like increasing productivity, reducing costs and making customers happier.

In fact, the process can be such an exciting one that businesses often forget a key component of pre-launch planning: how to measure the deployment's ongoing value.

"The vast majority of the people and companies that engage in a self-service initiative do not have any predetermined success criteria at all," said Tom Weaver, vice president of sales and marketing for Kiosk Information Systems. "Most people start with a prototype to evaluate the product, then move to pilot and then full deployment. It is usually in the pilot stage where most projects stall. We hear things like ‘If it works, we will move forward with deployment,' but they have no idea what ‘works' means."

With 2006 right around the corner, now is a great time to take an inventory of your self-service systems, and see if you're getting as much out of them as you should.

Despite the bewildering variety of kiosks and self-service applications, they can almost always be divided into two camps: transactional and informational. As the names imply, the former facilitates some sort of transaction (buying a ticket, printing a boarding pass, scanning and paying for groceries) while the latter dispenses information (an office wayfinding map, a retail price lookup, company info).

Transactional kiosks are the easiest to measure, as they are modeled on tangible metrics like number of transactions, revenue per transaction, and hourly activity. Countless useful statistics can be extrapolated from the data such a kiosk produces — percentage of customers that use plastic vs. cash, what times of day see the heaviest traffic, which items sell better at which locations at which times and on which days.

Experts agree that remote management of all this data is a must. Safwan Shah, president of Infonox, which provides financial transaction processing and self-service software, said that remote management software should allow management to view data in real-time, preferably with graphical visualization.

"With modern business activity monitoring tools, there should be zero latency in discovering customer experience," he said. "A self-service system should be providing instant feedback on customer behavior."

Charlie Casserta, president of Livewire International, said his company's hospitality and ticketing "eConcierge" kiosks measure every activity on the part of the user, down to what pages were viewed and for how long. If a customer begins a purchase transaction but doesn't complete it, that too is recorded — along with what screen the customer bailed out on.

He also said that adding a real-world component — in his case, a coupon — makes for a valuable connection to the transaction and its provider.

"With eConcierge, in the beginning, say a restaurant would buy an on-screen ad, and after the first year they wouldn't re-up," he said. "We'd do a survey and say, ‘Why didn't you re-up? This is not that expensive.' And they'd say, ‘I couldn't tell how many people were coming into my restaurant.'"

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"That's a metric that we were able to measure," he said. "From my standpoint, with a financial background, I'm looking to measure something. We try very hard to put something onto the kiosk that will allow us to measure it."

Measurement becomes a problem when there is no transaction to record. How can you tell, for instance, the impact your company's product information kiosk is having?

"For products with softer metrics, businesses can still look at the reduced number of complaints, the reduced number of customers asking for pricing help, and tie it to overall labor savings," said Nick Daddabbo, senior product manager for Hand Held Products. "It becomes a factor of a more efficient workforce."

Lief Larson, director of research for Valhalla Worldwide LLC, said that informational self-service devices provide an insight into the mind of the customer, and if viewed properly, become research tools for the company deploying them. For instance, it is easy for an informational kiosk to measure which pages are the most popular, which features are requested most often, what products are most often scanned for a price lookup, etc.

"By analyzing and improving the kiosk system and its link between the supplier, internal customers and the end customer, the entire process chain could result in a well-defined and synchronized improvement strategy that provides immediate as well as long-term improvement results," he said.

A key part of measurement is adjustment — that is, taking the information gleaned from your systems and making decisions about what to do differently.

But how long should you allow data to accumulate before making changes based on that data — in other words, how long should you allow your deployment to "find its legs"?

Opinions vary, and widely. Weaver said informational kiosks should demonstrate their worth within 30 days, while transactional applications should be given at least six months "to get a balanced representation."

Daddabbo said he likes to give projects 18 to 24 months, to let momentum build. "If you cannot see signs of success in that time frame, then it needs to change," he added.

Shah takes the opposite approach, feeling that systems need to work — and work well — sooner rather than later. "In a properly designed and deployed self-service system, there should be near-real-time tweaks toward improvement, and time to ‘find its legs' should never go beyond days."