Self service will soon become Kiosk service
You all must have seen kiosks at many locations at airports, supermarkets and some retailers. They have changed the perspective of self-service. Every time you have to enter a closed door you expect a kiosk been deployed there.
Digital kiosks have also evolved in the past decade or so, they have now become more user-friendly and are capable of handling complicated tasks in fields other than ATMs. Analysts believe that these machines should soon hit other fields like health-care products and medical offices.
Kiosks offer better prospects than human and many food chains are of the opinion that face-to-machine encounters results in better service and also saves money. But still humans will take a while to get used to this change.
Kiosk hardware is generally developed by giants like IBM and NCR, both of them should get ready to develop more machines to satisfy industry's greed for more. Many airlines are already using IBMs kiosks, Caribou Coffee and Cheesecake Factory employees use them to manage recipes and enhance order speed and accuracy. Even the music industry is not spared by this trend and music giants like Virgin Megastore in Times Square has 150 kiosks that process 450,000 music previews per month.
Some analysts believe that the industry has not even reached a small part of which it actually is capable of. Till now customers are hooked to their cell phones ordering pizzas, but they too are in need of something that can offer them some more control over their purchasing experiences. A report states that by the end of 2007, 800,000 customer kiosks, not including ATMs, would have been deployed in North America and the figure would reach a staggering 1.2 million by 2009.
This rise of the machines will make customers in North America spend more than $525 billion at self-check out lanes; this figure is expected to be well beyond the $1 trillion mark by the end of 2011.
Customers are now used to get their cash not from a human teller but an ATM machine. This gives them a 24x7 environment for withdrawing cash. They will now demand more machines that could help them in other events of their lives.
The next to benefit from this technology will be food-chains and some medical offices. McDonald's, Burger King are both testing the system and the technology providers hope to see a widespread adoption by 2010.
Companies that will benefit the most from this are IBM and NCR whose hardware goes into these machines. Basic machines which allow customers to pay with their cash cards cost around $3,000 each and full-service models that accept cash cost somewhere around $17,000 each.
Kiosks will continue to evolve and the next-gen machines will offer much more than simple customer service. These machines will also be able to recall past orders and ask customers if that's what they want or something new this time. These machines will then reduce the barrier between human customer service agents and kiosks, leading to a more global adoption of kiosks.
As most analysts feel the adoption of kiosks will not result in unemployment as the person taking care of the customer service desk will be there to train people to use these machines, but what when people become more accustomed to these machines. Well, there is no one who can train someone to use an ATM...!
Via: MSNBC
