Kiosk Solutions Apr-May 2017 | Page 19

opinion to retrofit over 500 kiosks already in field was tremendous, and a painful lesson about using consumer grade equipment for commercial applications.” See through the eyes of the end user Although a deployment may look good on paper from the deployer’s point of view, it’s easy to forget that part of the goal of using self-service technology is to create a great user experience. Furniture maker IKEA has long used kiosks that allow shoppers to sign up for their loyalty programs, and those devices generally garnered positive reviews. Unfortunately, the company stumbled in their venture into self-checkout kiosks. While most IKEA stores featured both self- service and cashier-operated checkout lanes, during the deployment the company only opened the cashier lanes on peak shopping days. On other days, no cashiers were available, and shoppers 3 various health issues in a reader-friendly format, the kiosks dispensed what amounted to a medical school textbook entry on whatever disease the user wanted to learn about. “Let’s say you wanted something about one of the signs of impending heart problems,” Mendelsohn said. “You got maybe 20 pages in at best eight point font. It was just unusable from a customer point of view. They had the opportunity to allow people to sign up for their newsletters and to promote the sale of their publications while offering information, but they just went about it all wrong.” Use commercial components Trying to get by with consumer grade components in a commercial deployment is a recipe for disaster. Using cheap components may save money up front, but it’s likely to cost much more over time in maintenance, lost sales and the eventual replacement of those components. 2 "A report issued by Stratistics MRC predicts that the market will reach $88.34 billion by 2022" In addition, multiple breakdowns are likely to foster distrust of the kiosks even when they are operational. If customers approach the kiosk and it’s out of order they may come back a second time, but if the device is out of order this time they’re likely never to return. Jamie Richter, regional sales manager at commercial touchscreen provider Elo, encountered such a situation with a large deployment. “A kiosk fixture company chose to use consumer-grade flat panel TVs inside a kiosk to save money, and after running 24/7 the panels overheated and started smoking within the kiosk enclosure,” Richter said. “The fixture company had to not only remove all of the panels inside the kiosks, but also replace them with new panels. The cost were directed to the self-checkout kiosks. The scanners quickly became a source of frustration. “A lot of the stuff you buy at IKEA comes in big boxes, so you can’t just pick it up and pass it across the scanner,” Mendelsohn said. “They did have these handheld devices that were tethered to the kiosks, but the tether wasn’t very long, and if you didn’t approach correctly the scanner couldn’t read the code.” In addition, there were no instructions on how to use the handheld scanners, leaving shoppers guessing about what to do. “Because this was so frustrating, a lot of people, myself included, just picked up the merchandise or wheeled the cart to another one and eventually checked out,” Mendelsohn said. Eventually, the negative feedback from customers grew so great KIOSK solutions 19