News

Solve problems with a turnkey solution

October 26, 2004

To stay competitive, retailers want cutting-edge kiosks. Yet retailers often have to work with several vendors to get the right deployment. A turnkey solution, provided by a single vendor, decreases deployment time and simplifies problem solving once the kiosk is in use.

Robert Giblett, director of North American sales and marketing for King Products, said of retailers, "They're turning kiosks, such as gift registries or price checkers into multifunctional kiosks that offer built-in training sessions to familiarize employees on the products they sell."

In kiosks, product locaters and price look-ups are becoming more sophisticated. Now customers can scan a barcode at a kiosk to pull up the product info and then view a video that shows them how to use that product.

This story and all the great free content on Kiosk Marketplace is supported by: King

Meanwhile, believe it or not, some stores change their prices up to four times a day to accommodate peak- and off-peak pricing schemes. By syncing both the cash registers and the kiosks with the retailers' back-office servers, these retailers can avoid confusing their customers.

And when most kiosks are separated physically from the main checkout areas, typical ethernet connectivity often is not practical. Deploying kiosks within WI-FI networks not only solves the connectivity problem, it makes the kiosks more portable.

Finally, when a retailer's server is remotely located from its kiosks, a secure connection must be established so that the data is private and cannot be hacked into. Real-time monitoring of kiosks in the field and the ability to update pricing and content to a single kiosk, a whole store, a group of stores or an entire fleet becomes extremely valuable.

Though valuable, with multi-functional kiosks comes complexity in purchasing and maintaining them. To simplify this process, KING Products offers the Solution Suite along with its kiosk hardware. The turnkey solution includes application software, kiosk software, back-office applications and also a content editor and a directory editor. Editing tools enable the retailer to update and manage the content on its kiosk after deployment.

Just as not all retailers are the same and many require customization of their kiosk solutions, the kiosk environment usually does not remain static after deployment. The turnkey kiosk solutions from KING allow the retailer to have ready-to-deploy, comprehensive hardware and software editing capability, and the content and directory editors themselves can be adapted as needed.

Make the right call

When multi-functional kiosk solutions that involve multiple vendors go wrong, retailers don't have time to try to figure out which one to call. Worst of all is when the vendors involved point fingers at each other while the retailer loses money.

A turnkey solution provided by one vendor means the first call for help will always be the right call. Giblett said, "We have everything under one roof. It's very easy for us to get our engineering team into a meeting with our software people. They can provide a quick response to any request."