Article

School is in for kiosks

A series of Web-based seminars sponsored by Netkey Inc. is explaining, showcasing some of the industry's top kiosk deployments.

February 18, 2002

When Linda Haelsen joined Netkey Inc. in May as a senior marketing manager, her skill sets included experience in helping people.

And the veteran of the call-center industry - she worked for Dictaphone Corp. before joining Netkey - believed that experience could translate into the kiosk industry. In particular, she identified self-help seminars - mini-conferences that allow people the opportunity to interact directly with companies in educational settings - as a way for Netkey to reach people within and outside the kiosk industry.

"It was a formula that worked (at Dictaphone)," Haelsen said. "We used it to do educational seminars in the call-center industry, there was a real thirst for knowledge - what works and what doesn't."

Since September, Netkey has sponsored a series of online seminars that have received recognition as an instructional tool for current and potential kiosk deployers.

"The one thing I liked best was it wasn't heavy-handed," said Francie Mendelsohn, president of consulting firm Summit Research Associates Inc. "It was very vendor neutral. We weren't sitting there for an hour getting a marketing spiel about how wonderful they are. Some of the examples they showcased weren't even driven by Netkey."

It has developed along the lines Haelsen expected, with participants gaining insight on the kiosk industry and Netkey getting to interact directly with current and potential clients.

"It's very much a positional thing," she said. "We pride ourselves on being an industry expert and having been around a long time. We're leveraging on this to develop and reinforce our identity as an industry leader. Plus, it's a great ways of developing contacts within the industry."

Welcome to the show

Netkey offered its first seminar, focused on best practices for the kiosk industry, in September. Seminars that focus on the financial and human resources industries have been added to the roster. Currently, the best practices seminar runs four times per month, financial twice, and human resources once.

When registrants sign up for the seminar, they receive an e-mail reminding them of seminar times. At the appointed time, participants join a conference call. The moderator leads the seminar over the conference call, with an accompanying PowerPoint presentation presented on Netkey's Web site.

After the seminar ends, participants are asked to fill out a survey rating the presentation. In addition, the PowerPoint presentation is mailed to all participants, giving them a resource guide for the topic at hand.

"We started out with the best practices seminar because most of the requests for information that came into our sales representatives focused on what would work and what wouldn't work," Haelsen said.

"The best practices seminar seems to be the most popular," she added. "It crosses a lot of industries and it seems to be good for end users that are looking for solutions and for service providers looking to develop solutions."

Learning lessons

By the end of 2001, about 350 people had signed up to take part in the seminars, with roughly 200 of them actually dialing in.

"Developing the content is the first thing, but getting people to come is almost as important," Haelsen said. "Not getting them here would be like throwing a party and not having any guests show up. We've been using our e-mail list from the monthly newsletter we send out. We've promoted it through that and our own Web site."

One person who has taken part in the best practices seminar is Mark Johnston, IT director for the Newberry Library in Chicago. Johnston said his organization, which is preparing to roll out a series of information and exhibit kiosks, needed a primer on kiosk technology.

Netkey's seminar series covers a range of topics.

"It turned out to be geared really well to the level we were at at the time," Johnston said. "It's geared to people that maybe have never done kiosk content development before."

Johnston said the seminar worked for his company because Netkey managed to instruct without appearing to be patronizing.

"The really basic points were the best; they really focused on keeping it simple," he said. "For my team to understand that you have to break down and keep the kiosk screens much simpler than on the Web site was important. And I don't think my team really understood you have to make things bigger on a kiosk."

Making plans

Netkey has only conducted the seminars for four months, but Haelsen said the company is already studying the potential for expanding the program.

"What's great about the technology we're deploying is we can really branch it out and do a lot of things with it," she said.

One possibility would expand the program beyond education to product demonstration.

"Right now we're focusing on education, but eventually we can offer training over the Web and there are demonstrations that we can show on the Web," Haelsen said. "There seems to be a real interest in kiosk design, the design of interfaces. To showcase that, we can combine PowerPoint with a live demonstration."