Article

How to deploy a reliable payment kiosk

Three tips to maintain the functionality of a payment kiosk solution.

December 29, 2013

by Jennifer Wickham

TIO Networks

Kiosk solutions today offer reliable, innovative ways to provide excellent customer service. As kiosks continue to grow in popularity, they are also increasingly becoming more complex with a wide range of offerings in applications, displays and multimedia capabilities. For many companies, the decision to pull the trigger on deploying a bill payment kiosk might be extremely difficult, but often the biggest challenge is maintaining a working kiosk.

There are a number of technical components in a bill-payment kiosk system. Such components include the hardware, kiosk enclosures, computer system, software components, cash collection, account balancing and system integration. An issue with anyone of these components could mean significant unscheduled downtime. Of course, kiosk downtime has tremendously negative consequences such as lost revenue, damage to the brand image, stalled operations, costs of repairing, and customer dissatisfaction.

Here are 3 tips on how to ensure the reliability of your bill payment kiosk:

Choose a reliable kiosk system with integration

In order to ensure the reliability of the payment kiosk system, it is critical to select and integrate all of these components in an optimized way. Since this requires expertise and experience, it is best to choose an experienced kiosk vendor to work with.

One of the common mistakes of an unsuccessful kiosk project is to choose a kiosk vendor that offers the lowest price, but has limited integration capabilities. The results of such are generally poor quality kiosks, high maintenance costs, and low customer satisfaction. Once you choose the right kiosk company to meet your company's needs, make sure they select quality hardware components and fully integrates into your existing payment processing system.

Early detection and remote diagnosis

Unscheduled kiosk downtime is bad, but sometimes unavoidable unfortunately even with the proper precautions. However, early detection is the best way to cut the length of time a bill pay kiosk is down. The most common (and probably most effective) solution is to implement remote management software that allows a kiosk manager/administrator to view the status of kiosks remotely and in real time.

The more details you know about the nature of the kiosk issue, the more quickly you are able to solve it. Remote monitoring systems can identify, troubleshoot and diagnose problems without anyone even visiting the site. Then, the kiosk manager can then relay to field support which parts and tools to bring and prepare in order to address the identified issues. Without this capability, the field support has to go to the kiosk site to diagnose the problem, leave and then come back again with right parts and tools, which results in higher repair costs and longer downtime.

Proactive payment kiosk maintenance

One more way to reduce unscheduled kiosk downtime is to conduct regular maintenance and replace/repair components before they cause problems or break down. Examples of proactive maintenance may include:

• Clean card reader regularly
• Change receipt roll paper before it runs out
• Check change and cash levels regularly to avoid running out
• Replace components such as printer paper cutter and hard disk before the end of their life cycle

It is challenging to know exactly when to conduct these maintenance steps for organizations. Having a mechanism to keep track of the component usage and send notification such as an email alert for recommended maintenance definitely helps.

Jennifer Wickham is the marketing coordinator with TIO Networks Corp., a cloud-based, multichannel bill-payment processor.

Read more about bill-payment kiosks.