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Beating the odds

July 21, 2005

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Many retailers who implement kiosk projects have about the same chance of achieving ROI as winning money in Las Vegas. Just like betting in Vegas, some retailers lose all at once, but for others it's just a matter of time.

Professional gamblers know that making money over the long run requires careful study and years of practice - even though the games look simple and are familiar even to most novices.

The same is true for kiosk deployments.

One of the reasons a lot of kiosk deployments fail is that implementing a kiosk project may look extremely simple from a superficial point of view. Some IT professionals may think that a touchscreen, a set of device drivers and a Web site are all it takes to develop a successful project. However, time after time that proves not to be the case. Even if the project is successful in the short term, in the long term most do not survive.

Uncommon success

The reasons for a kiosk project's eventual failure are usually twofold. First is the initial implementation. A self-service device should have one goal: to provide service to the customer quickly and in the clearest and easiest manner. A kiosk device should look and act like it was designed to perform the set of tasks specific to the needs of the customer. While this can be achieved with Web technology, it cannot be done just by linking the kiosk to an existing Web site. When setting up kiosk functionality, many find using a toolkit approach provides a quicker, easier-to-use result that is a more graphically rich experience for their customers.

The

second obstacle is a failure to consider winning over the long run. In the case of in-house-designed projects, the problem is that while the internal staff may have extensive time and resources during the project's development and launch, keeping the momentum up and resources available over the long term may be too much of a drain. Also, the solution's architecture itself may not have the robustness required to run in demanding retail environments or remain corruption-free for years of use.

You can slant the odds in your favor by engaging a true technology and software provider early in the project. According to a Gartner research report, kiosk software providers have experience far exceeding their domain and they are in a unique position to know all the challenges and potential solutions to problems that plague kiosk deployments.

According to Dr. Sylvia Berens, vice president of Apunix, "Our projects have been successes and met the objectives of our customers (because) we have the necessary experience and a unique appliance approach to kiosks that ensure all of our customers are long-term winners."