It’s Friday evening, and a busy executive pulls into a convenience store to pick up bread and milk on the way home from the office. Her first item of business is to pay her utility and credit card bills and get real-time information on her accounts.
Earlier, on his lunch break, the executive’s husband stopped by a kiosk to replenish their teenage daughter’s prepaid credit card and add more minutes to the daughter’s cell phone.
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King Products has already sold 90 kiosks with these capabilities to a client who is the first to market the kiosk in his geographic area, and wishes not to be named — yet. (Look for an update to this story after the client deploys another 250 kiosks in 2005).
“For retailers, the best part of these kiosks is that they are an off-the-shelf, turnkey solution,” said Robert Giblett, director of North American sales and marketing for King Products. “They offer a quick ROI and profitable per-transaction revenue.”
The kiosks are equipped with a 2-D bar code scanner, a credit card reader, a single or dual printer, dual displays, and a handset to enable telephony with voice-over-IP.
Through a secure Internet connection, the kiosks interface to three King Products servers. Depending on the service requested by the kiosks, they will connect to a payment management server, a prepaid card server or a bill payment server.
With dual screens, one of them can be used for general kiosk business while the other generates ad revenue. Dual printers allow one to serve as a dedicated receipt printer while the other generates coupons.
That type of kiosk allows retailers to take advantage of one of the hottest new buying trends: prepaid credit cards for teenagers. Appealing to parents who wish to control their children’s buying power, the prepaid cards lend themselves to branding opportunities and tremendous data mining capabilities. As the teen uses the prepaid credit card instead of cash, the teen’s shopping habits can be tracked. This will allow retailers to run promotions based on buying habits.
To protect customers from identity theft, no crucial data is displayed on the kiosk screen: the 2-D barcode reader allows the kiosk to gather the customers’ personal data automatically. In addition to protecting the customers’ identities, the reader also reduces keying errors and reduces the amount of time customers spend at the kiosk.
Busy customers who look for every opportunity to multi-task will appreciate kiosks found in a variety of different locales that offer multiple opportunities to knock tasks off their to-do lists. But these kiosks are not just designed for affluent, Type-A professionals. They can be used by a wide variety of customers who each seek different services. The ability to appeal to more customers and offer them more services will result in more profits for retailers.
