Retail
Self-service at retail: The growth has only begun
November 19, 2021
Retail self-service has been growing at a fast pace over the past several years, a trend that the COVID-19 pandemic has abetted.
How long will this growth continue?
According to a pair of experts from Zebra Technologies, don't expect the momentum to slow down any time soon.
Richard Thompson, sales vice president, global OEM, and Mark Thomson, director of retail and hospitality solutions for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, shared their thoughts on this topic during a Kiosk Marketplace podcast, "Self-service at retail: The growth has only begun," sponsored by Zebra Technologies.
Elliot Maras, editor of Kiosk Marketplace, served as moderator.
Thomson said since the pandemic, there has been some return to store based shopping in Europe, but not 100%.
"That's largely related to the fact that a lot of retail has shifted to online and people have gained that confidence and trust level with buying products online," Thomson said. "Shoppers that have returned are increasing their use of self service methodologies, whether that's scan and go services or use of kiosks."
Thompson said kiosk manufacturers are seeing continued growth in business as more retailers are using self-checkout.
The trend is even more visible in the hospitality sector, Thomson said.
"Hospitality has always been far more experience focused than the retail sector itself," Thomson said. This includes restaurants and theme parks.
"They don't want to be queued, they want to be served, straight away, plus the fact that the cost of wages and the difficulty in finding staff is exacerbating the problem for both retailers and hospitality businesses," Thomson said.
QSRs are seeing a big increase in spend per customer from kiosks, particularly in Europe where there is a bigger tendency to enter the store as opposed to the drive-thru, Thompson said.
Even drive-thrus are adopting a more kiosk type approach than traditional voice interaction with a clerk, Thompson said.
The overall shift to retail is also affecting the improvement of kiosk technology.
"There's pressure on the kiosk industry to ensure that that interface is very smart ,very slick," Thomson said, and integrated with the CRM to drive loyalty and cross sell and upsell. "It drives pressure to ensure that the kiosks and the interfaces are updated probably way more regularly than they are right now."
"They (the customers) want a convenient omnichannel way to shop," Thompson agreed. "Convenience means many options, and it's different options for different people."
"I think things like buy-online-pickup-in-store are driving business in the kiosk space as well," he said. "It might be pick up from a kiosk."
Another growth area, Thompsons said, is a returns kiosk. Online orders drive a lot of returns. In the apparel space, some customers buy three different clothing items, choose the one they want and return the others.
Kiosks will also become more multi-functional, Thompson said: a kiosk can be an order kiosk, a pickup kiosk and a return kiosk.
"Or they might be associated with a drop box or a smart locker whereby you interface to the kiosk but your goods are returned into the smart locker," he said.
Another benefit is enabling staff to be more productive.
Finding staff is a major challenge, Thomson said, and self-service technology can remove the more mundane tasks to allow staff to be more productive.
As for future innovations, Thomson mentioned voice interaction and image recognition.
Thompson added that the need for non-touch interaction technology has been implemented in kiosks, including gesture recognition.
In the near term, Thompson sees more integration of different technologies, such as kiosks interacting with drop boxes or return boxes. These integrations could serve to drive newer technologies such as face recognition.
"Kiosks have come a long, long way in terms of their benefit and the value they provide to the retailer," Thompson said.
Included In This Story
Zebra Technologies
Zebra’s scan engines for self-service kiosk solutions give customers seamless quick service technology while providing a long lifecycle they can count on.
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