As digitisation continues with its global takeover, the list of ordinary day-to-day tasks we can complete virtually, remotely - whatever you want to call it - continues to grow and grow. You don’t have to be that old to remember a time when mailing someone meant pen, paper and a stamp, payments were mostly made [...]
In the hotel industry, the quality of the guest experience has long been closely associated with the quality of service provided by staff. We see that summed up in the word ‘concierge’, which in its modern usage is synonymous with the world of luxury hotels and attentive front-of-house staff who not only greet guests but [...]
Remember the days when you had to wait for a new bank, ID or membership card to arrive in the post? Ok, trick question - in a lot of cases, that’s still the world we live in. But it doesn’t have to be that way any more. Self-service kiosk technology has changed a lot of [...]
Omnichannel is a term you hear crop up in business a lot these days. It means, as per Tech Target, “provid[ing] customers with a seamless and unified brand experience, regardless of which channel they use.” What this means in plain English is as follows. In the modern world, largely thanks to digital technology, business is [...]
As visual creatures, human attention tends to focus on whatever draws the eye most. So with kiosks, functionality centres around the touchscreen interface. In fact, it’s no accident that the vast majority of computerised devices, from smartphones to PCs, are operated via a graphic user interface (GUI) of some sort. It fits with the way [...]
‘Phygital’ might not be the most graceful portmanteau of two words ever thought up. But as a description of the blurring lines between physical spaces and digitised experiences, it speaks to a growing reality in our daily lives. This is especially evident in the restaurant sector. QSRs have long been associated with pioneering self-service kiosks [...]
Facial recognition technology has huge potential in the world of self-service. It is already widely used in kiosks for identification, security and personnel access, including in high-profile applications like border control. In sectors such as retail, food service, hospitality and more, facial recognition systems are being explored as options to administer account-based transactions - everything [...]
One of the classic errors businesses make with new technology is putting all their focus on the onboarding phase and expecting results to automatically follow. The underlying assumption here is that the simple act of adopting tech is sufficient to transform and improve operations. But it’s not technology per se that brings results. It’s how [...]
Kiosks are best known for providing self-service ordering and checkout options in retail and hospitality. But there’s an argument to say that the most common (or at least the most broadly applicable) use for kiosks is as information points. From airports to libraries, office complexes to hospitals, transport hubs to museums and other leisure attractions, [...]
It was Alan Turing, code-breaking war hero, computer science pioneer and all-around mathematical genius, who gave one of the earliest versions of the much-recycled “the machines are taking over” quote. It was during a pretty obscure lecture given in 1951 that Turing suggested that humanity would “at some stage… have to expect the machines to [...]
