In today's mobile, hyperconnected world, customers have sky-high expectations for fast and increasingly personalized services. To help them deliver, organizations across the banking and quick service restaurant (QSR) sectors are turning to digital self-service kiosks.
For QSRs, the pressure to compete on all fronts – from customer experience to supply chain management – means restaurant operations must be as seamless and efficient as possible.
QSR chains must keep the flow of customers through their locations as fast as possible, while boosting average value per customer, and ensuring order accuracy. Customers also expect a wide range of meal combinations and offers.
The banking industry is also facing a seismic shift in the demands and expectations of its customers.
The rise of online and mobile banking has been a game-changer for many brick-and-mortar financial institutions: customers now expect an increasing number of services to be available digitally and in a quick turn, serve-yourself model.
“The banking sector is witnessing stiff competition, and hence, the use of advanced facilities to attract more and more customers towards a bank's branch is vital for sustained business growth. Some of the services such as transactions, cheque deposit and querying are provided through banking and financial kiosk. The banking and financial kiosks provide enhanced facilities other than what an ATM can offer to the customers.”
The Rise of the Self-Service Kiosk
For QSRs, kiosks offer:
- Increased revenue - some are seeing a 30-50% sales lift thanks to greater cross-selling and advertising opportunities.2
- An enhanced customer experience – users can easily customize their order, and also enjoy decreased wait times.
- Streamlined inventory management, and minimized inaccuracy.
- More time for staff to focus on customer service and other priorities.
For banks, kiosks offer:
- Interactive, more secure and personalized banking with services that go beyond traditional automatic teller machine (ATM) capabilities.
- Increased efficiency in branches and decreased wait times for customers.
- A way to expand their operations and effectively serve a larger consumer base in emerging regions and across rural areas.
- The ability to offer extended hours and weekend operation where demand is high.
For more detail on the benefits self-service kiosks provide, read our new infographics on improving services and increasing revenue for self-service kiosks for banking and quick service restaurants.
Hardware Considerations for Kiosks
Systems integrators (SIs) have a big opportunity to add value for their banking and QSR customers by building solutions that address their unique kiosk requirements. Of course, to do so, they need to select the right hardware for each use case. Key factors to consider include:
Security – especially for banking services, where personal data is often required, the secure operation of digital self-service kiosks is paramount. Customers should feel their transactions and personal data are safe. Invest in hardware with endpoint security features that have a deeper layer of built-in protection.
Ease of management – when operating a fleet of kiosks, it’s essential that they’re easily and remotely manageable in real-time. This helps merchants to quickly update menus or services and push out important security updates, for example. The right remote management technology can also reduce downtime by ensuring the operating system isn’t required to quickly and securely bring hardware back online.
Connectivity – if a kiosk loses connection mid-transaction, customers will inevitably be unhappy. This is especially true in banking – what if a customer is left unable to make a secure transaction? Or get confirmation that a time sensitive bill was paid? Strong, reliable connectivity and sufficient bandwidth are a must.
Scalability – banks and QSRs understandably want assurances that the capabilities of their kiosks can evolve along with customer expectations. As an example, QSR kiosks today use touch screens to take orders, but voice command is not far away and offers a more hygienic way to interact with the technology. Once it arrives, organizations shouldn’t need to buy more hardware to support it.
Advanced processing capabilities – kiosks - especially those with vision capabilities - can generate a vast amount of data, so low-latency edge processing is required to make sense of it all. By doing so, banks and QSRs can gain powerful insights into their customers and generate additional revenue. With audience analytics, QSRs can provide tailored offers and predictive menu options based on the characteristics of each individual customer. For banks, authentication technologies can speed up the log-in process, meaning a greater range of services can be offered through the self-service kiosk. This could include promotions on popular products (e.g. ice cream in the summer) and help banks and QSRs new to a particular location to provide localized, hyper targeted marketing.