Are Customers Actually Using Your Kiosks? Here’s How to Make Sure They Do

A lot of time, money and effort goes into a kiosk roll out. Businesses can spend months exploring hardware and software options, pouring over specifications, having customised tools built and running tests and pilots.

Understandably, there’s a sense of relief and celebration when roll out is completed. Everyone can pat themselves on the back for a job well done. Or, at least, that’s often the prevailing mood.

The problem is, roll out doesn’t really tell you anything about whether the project is a success or a failure. Yes, it’s good to get the heavy work done and get through switch-on without a hitch. But making sure everything works is just the starting point. What really matters is whether people will actually use the kiosks.

We’ve seen plenty of self-service projects flounder on the all-important issue of customer adoption. Put simply, you can’t just switch a bank of kiosks on and expect people to use them. Customer adoption takes planning and care.

It also takes time. We’ve also seen lots of instances where, in the days and weeks immediately after launch, everything seems fine, people are happily using the new machines. But then curiosity wanes, a few glitches creep in, and customers start to gravitate back to the staffed counters. Before you know it, usage rates are way below forecasts.

If people don’t use kiosks as expected, it’s impossible to get good returns on your investment. That’s why we always advise clients to make customer adoption a central part of their roll out strategy. Here are some tips for doing just that.

Give customers a reason to use your kiosks

People don’t just use kiosks because they are there. There has to be a benefit to using them. If there isn’t, or if the benefit isn’t obvious, customers will quickly revert back to staffed service options purely out of habit.

The top reasons people give for why they use kiosks include faster transactions, more time to browse or look up information independently, more privacy compared to asking a member of staff for help and, in environments like QSRs, more freedom to customise orders and with more accurate outcomes.

If you want people to use your kiosks, then you should plan explicitly to meet these needs, and preferably roll multiple benefits together.

Make the experience reliably easy

Another common issue we see that affects customer adoption is that kiosks just aren’t easy and obvious to use. They might be tucked in a corner so people have to go out of their way to use them. They might have screens that are too small for the tasks the kiosk is designed for, making the UI fiddly. They might be positioned so there is glare from lighting or windows on the screen, making it difficult for users to see.

All of these and more will harm usability, and therefore harm usage rates. They can all be avoided with good planning that prioritises the customer experience.

Help people acquire the habit

We said earlier that people easily revert back to staffed service out of habit. That is the default they have always known. Changing that to make using kiosks the default takes work.

This is where you need your staff onboard. They need to become advocates for your kiosks, informing customers that they are there, recommending them as an option that will save them time or let them find what they are looking for independently. But they also need to be ready and able to help customers use kiosks, show them how they work, and fix any minor issues quickly.

That means appropriate training, but also making sure kiosks bring benefits to your staff, too. If it’s quicker and easier for them to serve a customer directly, rather than expect to be called over to help them at a kiosk in two minutes’ time, why would they recommend it? Your kiosk strategy needs to consider your operational workflows, too, and bring clear benefits in terms of freeing up staff time.

In summary, the initial roll-out is really only the end of the beginning of kiosk implementation. The real test comes in the weeks and months that follow, and success depends squarely on customer adoption. If you don’t build that into your planning at the earliest stages, you risk undermining the whole project.