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Three important ways to positively reflect your brand in self-service.

A good experience for the customer will help set you apart from your competitors as forward-thinking and innovative.

November 24, 2014 by Marek Narkiewicz — CEO, GWD Media Ltd

While the advantages of self-service – queue-busting, availability, reduced staffing costs – all speak for themselves, a major concern for many businesses is the lack of control over their corporate image. With no trained human involved in the transaction, it's a scary thought that the first and maybe last impression a customer may get of your organization is entrusted to a faceless machine.

It's true that a website suffers from the same problem, although things like live chat support can help to mitigate it somewhat. But by definition a website is hidden away on the internet and only used by people comfortable with technology. A self-service kiosk or tablet is often meant to replace or support staff on-site.

Poorly implemented self-service solutions aren't just going to make people less likely to use your latest queue-busting kiosk – they're going to turn customers off your brand as well. Conversely, a good experience for the customer will help set you apart from your competitors as forward-thinking and innovative.

Consider the following three ways to positively reflect your brand in self-service:

1. Get the physical experience right. A huge amount of time, effort and money get put into designing and fitting retail presences, but we still see generic, bland self-service installations all over the place. These types of installations are timid, demonstrating that the business isn't fully committed to self-service and is just dipping its toes in the water. If you aren't fully behind the idea, why should the customer be? Your self-service installation should be an extension of your retail presence, with appropriately and attractively branded equipment and signage.

2. Get the digital experience right. The website industry has come on a long way in recent years, with renewed focus on user experience (UX), and accessibility for different people and on different platforms. Thankfully, these skills and techniques are directly transferable to self-service. The market shift to touchscreen devices is fantastic for our industry – both preparing customers for using self-service devices and increasing their sophistication at doing so. The cost of this is a more demanding user, who should be catered for with a well-designed, UX-optimized user interface with tight branding and a focus on clarity and ease of use.

3. Be prepared to train and deploy staff to help. It might seem counter-intuitive, but in the initial stages of a project when you're getting your customers used to self-service, a friendly helping hand works wonders. Coming from the Web angle again, site designers and UX professionals would give anything to have staff on hand to assist and observe as people use their work. While good hardware and software can prevent a lot of problems, inevitably things will go wrong; a customer may be confused by options or just need some guidance to continue with an unfamiliar process. Having somebody on hand to make sure the experience goes smoothly and to report their observations will dramatically increase the chances of customers re-engaging with your self-service project.

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