At some time, hasn’t everyone been up late watching television and been accosted by a fast talking announcer speaking glowingly about the next wave of unlimited income potential with kiosk placement in high traffic locations? I know I have seen these commercials and we have been intimately involved with the technology that provides a self-service platform to deliver pre-paid products and content to end users.
    While we are a technology and processing company, our platform and hardware has been utilized in conjunction with many third party marketing firms that sell the solution of kiosk, site location and kiosk content with very mixed results.
    Most of the kiosks are configured similarly: 15-17 inch touch screen, bill acceptor, credit card reader, receipt printer, internal computer, telephone (for VOIP connections) and sometimes card dispenser. Other configurations do exist with scrolling topper message units and side mount carts; the units appear similar to many of the more sophisticated ATM devices that are beginning to make their way into the market.
    The kiosk can display advertising messages, dispense and read prepaid gift cards, provide cellular top off PINS and just about any prepaid concept that can be hosted on a remote server or database. The kiosk can also be a handy Internet portal for people to pay to search their e-mail in box, or to make a phone call utilizing VOIP connectivity. The kiosks that we have deployed are made by leading manufacturers in America, Asia and Canada each with their own cabinet design and internal cabling configurations.
    If you read through the various trade journals and visit merchants around the country you may have seen the Blackstone Touch-n-Buy® product which is a small counter top Touch screen computer with a separate printer device. Primarily a long distance sales tool it is a slick product that, with the right counter person close at hand, can be an effective device for marketing phone card products and other prepaid content. Giant vending company Coinstar™ went on a buying spree a year or so ago and purchased Prizm Technologies a kiosk company, and CellCards® a cellular and long distance top off company. With these two companies Coinstar will begin rolling out “Prepaid centers” which are kiosks that should serve the areas we are touching on here (as an aside can you imagine the business plan and presentations that these people put together 15 years ago when they went around raising venture funds? “People will bring loose change into the supermarket and we’ll count the money and charge them 9%” ...who would have thought; that’s for another article).
    Back to my earlier comment about mixed results. I would say that right now we are working with three different placement companies that are selling various kiosks with our back end software distributing pre-paid products representing hundreds of different companies and individuals. The average life expectancy of the merchant account appears to be slightly over 8 months. The main reason for the failures or the unrealized expectations is that people that buy into the kiosk distribution concept are under the misconception that people will approach these devices with the familiarity of a self service gas pump.
    The biggest self service kiosk success that we can point to is the Airline terminal ticket printing kiosk. Everyone is looking for some way to shave even 5 minutes off the brutality of air travel these days, so everyone wants to give the kiosk a try. Even then, the Airlines will usually have a customer service rep within earshot of the passenger line to give people a hand with the transaction, or to suggest they try the device instead of wait on line. The point is that it takes work to induce trial by consumers for these devices.
    In an article previously published in Transaction World, we wrote about category management and how many products require salespeople to perform demonstrations at retail locations to introduce the general public to a new product or service. Kiosks and their success are no different. We have seen the kiosks deployed in the marketplace and it is quite interesting, on a behavioral standpoint, as to what happens when someone passes a multimedia kiosk.
    The consumer walks around the device a few times, pokes at the screen, picks up the phone and usually walks away without a purchase. Unfortunately, many operators and owners of these kiosks believe that trial will come naturally to a consumer which is not the case. Maybe in gadget happy Japan, these kiosk devices would be received differently, however in the U.S. marketplace, we feel that product demonstrations in conjunction with retail placement with trained retail staff will be the only way in the near term to guarantee transaction counts.
    Of course this will change in the coming years as we see more kiosks replacing human or manual tasks (a noteworthy product placement is the digital camera printing device in CVS and Eckert locations manufactured by Kodak®).
    With the plethora of high margin prepaid products and services in the market today, and the new products being released each month, the future will become brighter for the kiosk in the coming years. The early pioneers will take some arrows however, if the industry takes note of the successes and the failures, there will be strong growth in this sector. Again, as we have said before, nothing sells itself and the kiosk is no different. Training and an engaged sales team are key components as part of the overall product assortment and retail placement plan that any company is considering.