Article

The retail kiosk comeback

In a recent study, Forrester Research's Tamara Mendelsohn says retail kiosks are ripe for a comeback, after the "big flop that kiosks experienced in the late `90s."

December 11, 2005 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

Forrester Research's recent report The Retail Kiosk Comeback prophesies a return of the kiosk to the retailer's radar. But doesn't that imply that it went off the radar at some point?

Author Tamara Mendelsohn said that's exactly what happened, and planning and design were to blame.

"The late `90s saw the emergence of in-store kiosks, but with few exceptions they've carried the biggest promise and shown the least payoff," she writes in the report. "Due to poor interface design, careless placement plans, and lack of organizational alignment, many of these kiosk projects were doomed to fail before they even hit retail floors."

This is not to say that kiosks weren't used, and that they didn't please many of the customers and retailers who used them. But things certainly could have been better, and new marketplace forces are making an impact on retailer attitude.

For one thing, the report notes that multichannel expectations are starting to be felt in a very real way. The Web has become a serious consumer tool for product research, and retailers have to find a way to integrate that enormous body of information into their in-store shopping experience.

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Then, there's the drive of technology. Mendelsohn notes in the report that when stores upgraded their POS systems, adoption of high-speed Internet access inside stores also increased. This newly installed bandwidth, coupled with the newly available budget thanks to the completed POS installations, means more robust in-store kiosks are within reach.

In an interview, Mendelsohn said that kiosk companies are going to have to work hard to win retailer confidence, and in turn, retailers will have to work hard to get consumers to give the machines another try.

"Kiosk usage was higher two years ago than it is today," she said. "Why? Because many of the early deployments provided little value to consumers and were a usability nightmare. This scared off so many consumers from approaching kiosks, so as retailers launch the new generation of kiosks, they will have to work hard to win back the consumer trust."

Mendelsohn also said that early retail kiosks suffered from a problem that is typically the kiss of death for any business technology: lack of company-wide buy-in. "Many of the early kiosk deployments were championed by the e-commerce team without significant involvement from store operations, marketing or even IT," she said. "As a result, they never gained the company-wide support that these types of initiatives need in order to achieve success, not to mention the fact that store employees wanted nothing to do with them."

Keys to success

In the report, Mendelsohn says that for any next-generation retail kiosk to be successful, it must integrate at least five key components: product information, inventory data, e-commerce capability, Web content and loyalty data.

"The retail kiosk killer app must be integrated with other channels, it must solve a problem or enable a service, and it must trump other technology alternatives," she said. As an example, she points to loyalty kiosks, which give the retailer an opportunity to interact with the customer and their loyalty data at a point prior to checkout.

She said another example that meets the "killer app criteria" is one that helps a customer make decisions about complex products, like consumer electronics, where the level of expertise of store personnel is often insufficient. "Kiosks that tie into product data and customer reviews as well as provide guided selling capabilities combined with the hands-on help of a sales associate will provide the level of experience that consumers are growing to demand," she said.

About James Bickers

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