News

Modular machines grow with your business

February 14, 2005

Do you want to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to investing in a kiosk solution?

If so, consider a modular approach to your kiosk design. With this approach, various kiosk components, or modules, are added or subtracted from the basic kiosk as needed. Components can include an LCD display, printers, scanners, keyboards, secondary screens, bill and/or coin acceptors and card readers.

KING Products is one company that specializes in turnkey solutions based on a modular kiosk. Building a kiosk from component peripherals enables KING to bring its products to market more quickly.

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"Our experience indicates that you start deployment slowly and add things (modular components) as requested," said Robert Giblett, KING Products' vice president of North American sales and marketing. A flexible kiosk will more easily accommodate changing store requirements and evolving kiosk projects.

One of the biggest benefits of using a modular kiosk design is that it minimizes downtime. From the field, a technician can replace the component requiring service, and send the affected component back to the manufacturer for repair.

"The kiosk can then be up and running in 20 minutes," said Giblett, adding that every minute the kiosk is down, money is lost. The alternative to this scenario is having a service technician inside the kiosk for two or three hours, diagnosing and repairing the problem.

According to Giblett, there is nothing worse than a kiosk being down a day or two. "If people see that too many times, they are not going to use that kiosk."

Blending in and keeping up

Most retailers want their kiosks to blend in with the store environment. A modular design allows for more creative kiosk housing.

In the past, big boxes were built to hide the kiosk components. Giblett said the modular approach allows KING to "let our architectural designers do something nice, without the hardware constraints."

As kiosk projects evolve, requirements change. A modular kiosk can keep up with this evolution. For example, a retail kiosk may initially provide product information and pricing. A printer can be added later for coupons.

Antonio Pena, product manager for KING Products, cites gift registry kiosks as an example. Retail customers use the kiosks to print gift lists for shopping. If the kiosk was modular, retailers could "make it transactional by adding a card reader," said Pena.