Kiosks in Grocery - Uptime is important!

This is not what you nor your customers want to see.

This was taken at a Cincinnati Kroger's grocery location yesterday as my wife and I shopped for our once a month groceries. The deli ordering kiosk which normally sits just inside of the entry to the main store, was sitting by the shopping carts corral with this ugly but obvious sign. When your customers become so familiar with and used to the self service kiosks you implement in your store, it can be a real disappointment to them when it's unavailable. And while no kiosk can have 100% uptime, you should at least move the kiosk out of their view when it is unavailable. Now, truth be told, I think this was temporarily set aside while they were remodeling the space it normally sits in. New floors, new drywall, new counter tops, etc. so they had good reason to have this kiosk out of commission, and there was a second kiosk closer to the deli. But I believe they could have put this near a power outlet and dropped a temporary Ethernet to it for connectivity. But maybe this is too much of an over simplification of what it would take (I don't know their setup and networking). This would keep the customers happy, and the deli running efficiently... all of the reasons you deployed to begin with.

On a similar note, we just installed new kiosks for Krogers in a new store that hasn't opened yet in Norwood, Cincinnati. These kiosks are for a completely different purpose in the Personal Finance section of the store. We worked with their vendor who creates a lot of their retail displays and store fixtures. They were to provide an "enclosure" around our IBM AnyPlace kiosk computer. But as of the time we brought the kiosks, connected and installed, they had not delivered the enclosures. As a matter of fact, the client had not even seen them yet. So this should be an interesting integration. We believe that we should have been engaged for the entire kiosk enclosure, software and hardware, and let that partner focus on what they do best. You know it's bad when the client contacts us to provide a turntable type solution to this yet unseen enclosure. Shouldn't that partner have provided that? Ah well, we will go above and beyond to ensure that this deployment goes well.

In the past we have also integrated kiosks into other grocery retailers for loyalty card systems. The kiosks are highly used and loved by the customers as a means to redeem their points and update their account information. In our initial deployment we had a problem with one of the printers not printing correctly and I was needed onsite to help troubleshoot (hardware firmware needed updating). Trust me, when you take one of the two kiosks offline even for a few minutes, the customers are not happy. They had to walk to the other entrance to use that kiosk instead, but they felt inconvenienced. And they were, but the point is that customers love self service. And when they become familiar and accustomed to using it, you need to ensure it is there for them. Don't disappoint your customers and don't take the easy way out. Keep that kiosk online!


Update: Weeks later my wife and I returned to do our weekly shopping (yes, we are trying to eat at home more often) and found to my delight that the staff had taken off the hand written note and put the kiosk back online! They had even improved the signage and branding on and around the kiosk. Nice job! The original location of the kiosk has been replaced with an in store clinic which may be a new trend in additional services being provided by grocers to enable customers to perform many tasks with one visit, ensuring customer loyalty and foot traffic. This explains why the kiosk was in transition and temporarily offline. My preference would be to not have any kiosk, than the one with the "out of order" note taped to it. Consumers need to know that systems are always working to build trust.



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Tis the season to plan your next kiosk project

Well, it has been a busy December. Our firm has been cranking out proposals for kiosks and digital signage like mad men! This is the time of year when many corporations need to either spend money by the end of the year, or they are taking the slow time at the holidays to start planning initiatives for 2008. Often, the planning and fact finding is done at this time of year, to prepare for budgeting season that is often in the March time frame. Budgeting is proposed internally, and then approved by the end of the corporate calendar year which is often June. That money is then part of the following corporate calendar year's budget. Development on these projects may not start in earnest until the summer or fall of next year.

This is an annual exercise for firms like Electronic Art and my competitors. We are all cranking out proposals, responding to RFP's, and letting everything else get pushed back while we attempt to land this new business. It can be frustrating, but this is when many projects are born, and this groundwork can make it possible to land that project in the late spring. There is often a long sales cycle in regards to these projects. It can be frustrating for the "new business development" staff, but accepted.

If you are looking for firms to bid on a kiosk or digital signage project, take a look at your needs. Think about what "pain" you are trying to solve, and do a good job of outlining what you want from the vendor. If what you need is an off the shelf solution, start comparing apples to apples. If your needs are custom or you want it custom built so you "own it" and don't have to pay licensing... outline the project well, and find vendors who will be consultative in their approach. Often a good vendor can suggest good features for your project that you may have overlooked, and raise concerns about feasibility and cost (do you REALLY have a Google budget to build this??) and tell you how they can save you money, or implement tools to speed up time to deliver.

For example, we once had a client with a small budget that needed a content management tool to manage the kiosk. We could have built him one if he had budget, but he needed to spend much of his budget on hardware, design, and video production. So we suggested the use of a free third party tool to allow him to manage textual content, in this case it was a calendar of events. This allowed him to spend his money where he really needed it. Now we also had to explain the dangers, which include that vendor going out of business, etc. But the risk was low since the third party vendor was Google. We integrated the Google tool within a day and had that portion of the project out of the way.

At the same time, realize that your kiosk vendor has to be careful not to give you a full project description for free that you can shop around to his competitors. So often a consultative approach may lead to a consultation fee to cover the cost of R&D, Project specifications creation, flow charts, wireframes, etc. If you don't have this work already done, then expect to pay for it. In the end, you'll have all you need to get the funding, or have a clearly defined project, so you and your vendor know what is being built.

Some prospects come to us with clear specifications for their project, so we can give clear pricing. Others are vaguely written, or don't have enough information to accurately price but still want a price by next week. So those proposals are often written with price ranges such as "between $50K - $75K depending on complexity". If the client cannot define how complex it will be, what features it will have, and what level of integration is needed... how can I know what it will cost me to build it? As a solution provider, I have to be fair to the client and my company.

A kiosk solution provider should listen to your needs, and be consultative in their approach. Sometimes it is not about selling you the biggest project they can, but rather selling you the right project for your budget or what is right for the project. But make sure you are being fair to them and giving them what they need to help you. Like Jerry Maguire said to Rod Tidwell in the movie "Jerry Maguire" - - "Help me... help you".

Disappointing Kiosks

You've probably seen a kiosk that has an error message on screen or even a kiosk that has a blank screen. A non functioning kiosk is worse than no kiosk at all. It undermines the consumer's trust in a reliable source of content or their trust in the capabilities of the provider. Sure, we all pretty much understand that computers are not perfect and will need some maintenance from time to time, and that not every company has world class IT support teams. But you can implement systems that will alert your team when something goes awry, or reboots itself in attempts to clear the problem. Sadly, many companies that implement kiosks don't want to consider these possibilities, or they are the first thing in the budget that gets "nixed" when trying to make the numbers work. Ongoing maintenance and support are important considerations. Onsite warranty from hardware manufacturers combined with good software infrastructure and a plan... are the basics of maximizing uptime.



But one thing that is perhaps even worse than a non functioning kiosk is a kiosk that is well designed, has good signage, has a good purpose, and then fails to deliver on it's promise. I recently saw an example of this at the Cincinnati Airport (CVG). As you enter the baggage claim area there are two large stations of three kiosks each, that promise the visitor hotel information and courtesy phones. When you approach the screen, you see three links: Hotel Courtesy Phone, Visitor Information and Kiosk / Airport advertising information. Obviously, this was put together by whomever has a lock on airport advertising, otherwise why would you give that last topic such importance for a visitor kiosk? When you click on Hotel Courtesy Phone you get a page with a bunch of logos of local hotels and basic information on them. If you click a button, it promises to call that hotel for you so you can book a room. The phone dialing did not work.



So I tried the Visitor information in hopes of finding out what to do around town, where to eat, shop, and perhaps some quick local history. Nope, the page loaded with a simple but terrible message: "Content coming soon". I can tell you that these kiosks had already been deployed for months, and still there was no content. I was disappointed. Not happy, not delighted, not impressed, I was let down by the content provider, not the hardware or operating system. It was simply a lazy provider of content that did not live up to their promise to the consumer.


I wanted to voice my dis-satisfaction so I clicked the third link to learn about airport advertising and find the company responsible for the content. But guess what, I found the same "Content coming soon" message on this screen. So even if I wanted to add my hotel to the list, or find out how to help this sad excuse for a content provider... I could not. I had to shake my head and let out a slight chuckle that can only come from someone in the business. I should sit nearby and see how many other visitors come away from the kiosks with a positive experience. I'm sure I'd be sitting for many hours. Turns out the kiosks are provided by cvg-ads.com, which I looked up on my Blackberry browser. The site was empty too. Ugh. However, I just checked it again and it forwards to coreyairportservices.net which is also light in actual content, and overly complex in design of the flash tool to show available ads. They will show rate cards for some items, but not the kiosks. They do digital signage and promotions within the CVG airport. It appears that this is their first airport market.





The kiosk hardware is nice enough, these are Slabb brand kiosk enclosures, with touch screen and phone handsets. I even liked how the power cords were nicely covered where they run into the wall and plugged into a power source in a room behind the wall. Nicely done! So I can find no fault in the hardware installation, no fault in the operating system and the screen design was even decent. But the most basic element, the content was limited or missing. The opportunity was there, and they missed it. How many people tried to get some value from these kiosks during their first months of deployment and were also disappointed? Those visitors will likely never walk up to those kiosks again. You get one chance to make a first impression and you had better not mess it up. A returning guest at your kiosk will cut you a break when you have a temporary hardware / software failure, but that's because they already like the product you deliver which is "the content". A first time guest will not give you any slack and will not likely return.