APPLE INC. When you're thinking about your custom software solution, sometimes it's not clear whether a kiosk solution or a mobile app would be better. Since everyone carries a phone around in their pocket, why would you invest in kiosks?
Following are excerpts from this interview.
A. Self-service is really just doing a transaction without interacting with a person. This can include either a mobile transaction or a transaction at a self-serve kiosk.
Q. Everyone's got a smartphone in their pocket. So why would you go with a standalone kiosk as opposed to a smartphone if everyone has a phone? Is there a reason why one, mobile or kiosk, makes more sense than the other for a particular application?
A. They solve different aspects of the self-service experience. Smartphones make a lot of sense to do different transactions repeatedly, such as being able to shop from the convenience of my home, with my phone.
Kiosks are more about if you're going to go into a physical brick-and-mortar store and you want to have more of an express lane type experience. There are also "endless aisle" kiosks where you can get all sorts of information about products.
Maybe you don't want to walk up to the person at Home Depot and explain that you don't know about different kinds of paint. You just want to kind of go through and research it and you might have a kiosk there that's made by the paint manufacturer that explains the different kinds of things and lets you print out different color swatches or whatever it might be.
Kiosks are really meant to be like a physical in-person thing. Kiosks also have a physical presence about them. For example, you see the Copy Your Own Key Kiosk when you're walking in the grocery store, and they're eye catching. So it also kind of acts like a sign that will draw people in.
You'll even see kiosks that will have secondary signs on them, digital signs to make them even more eye catching.
A. Right. I also think people have more privacy concerns with mobile apps. You know, "It's on my phone, my pictures are on here, what's it going to do? What can it see?"
There is friction to getting people to actually install apps. So it depends on the use case. There's a distrust for what Google or
One of my first positive experiences I remember with a kiosk was this express lane concept at movie theaters. As a teenager waiting in line where all the other people in front of me were trying to decide what they wanted to see and what movies were sold out. And then they had to talk with their friend about the next movie they wanted to see.
Then I saw a kiosk with three people in line and I could just go up there and pay just like an express lane. It wasn't even really that I didn't want to interact with a person, it just was a faster way to do business on my own terms. And then I could just take that ticket and then walk in. Kiosks are really great for express lane type functionality.
A. Kiosks are really great with credit card payments. It can be very fast to pay. You can check out at restaurants by scanning a QR code and select
So kiosks are really the way to go if there's any sort of cash payment or there are lots of peripherals that need to be attached. Your mobile phone has a webcam, but can it do fingerprints? Does it have a receipt printer? We can't physically attach those peripherals to a phone and there's also the complexity of people having phones with different capabilities.
With a phone, I don't know whether you're running iOS 14 or 15, or whether you're running an iPhone 7 or an iPhone 12 or one of the bazillions of different Android variations. With a kiosk, you have this very controlled environment.
Q. So if someone's looking to get into self-service, all of these factors that we've talked about need to come into play when you're deciding, do I build a physical kiosk or do I build an app and know that you're going to deal with some upsides and some downsides? Does that seem like a pretty accurate assessment?
A. Absolutely. And I mean, that's the kind of process that we go through during the whole road mapping process. So we'll have a customer come to us and say, "Hey, I want to build a mobile app for this, or I want a kiosk for this." And then we'll start asking them questions about how it's going to be used.
With mobile people are bringing their own hardware to the equation. So it ends up being a very software type solution. With kiosks, you've got a computer, you've got a physical enclosure that's going to be built out of steel and sturdy, or there are more cost effective solutions where you've got tablets that are inside enclosures and things like that.
A. The software's probably going to be about a 10 times the hardware.
Now if you're deploying a hundred kiosks, the hardware could easily eclipse that. So as a general rule of thumb when I'm having a conversation with someone, one of the early questions is, "How many kiosks are you going to deploy?" If they're going to deploy one or two, or three, it's really important to calculate the ROI because it's difficult when you have that few kiosks to bring in enough business for enough transactions to be going through them. Kiosks make more and more sense at scale.
Copyright © 2021 Networld Media. All rights reserved., source
