Last year about this time, I talked to my staff about making some professional resolutions. You know, we’d commit to reading a business-themed book a quarter, or to joining and becoming active in a professional organization. I thought we could benefit from sharing these resolutions and following up on them from time to time throughout the year.
It lasted a month.
If your position has the power to influence your self-service deployments, odds are you could make some changes to them in 2008 that would make the machines more useful to their users and therefore better for your company’s bottom line. With optimism that you’ll have better success than I did in 2007, here are five resolutions you can make, each with self-service in mind:
1. Be a user and a watcher. Have you gone into one of your locations and tried your kiosk? How about the self-service devices at other businesses? Pay attention to how the experience yours delivers fares on its own and in comparison. I recently used a self-checkout kiosk at a local library. Things worked great until it asked the password for my library card — a question not made at the counter. I bet 90 percent of would-be users don’t know their library card passwords. Yet, the librarian had just complained she had no idea why the machines weren’t used more.
2. Take cash. Wherever you can, whenever you can. The United States Postal Service is having trouble getting customers to use the award-winning Automated Postal Center kiosk, which takes cards but no bills or coins. Yet, as we reported on Self-Service World.com, USPS officials know most users want to pay cash for postage.
3. Do inspections. My route to work passes only one gas station, and filling up anywhere else is a hassle. But I’ve gone stretches where I’ve driven out of my way to avoid the more convenient pumps. Why? Because the receipts on the self-serve pumps always are out of paper. Whatever your kiosks may do, they probably have something that can run out or break or get so dirty no one wants to touch it. If your deployment is too big to inspect personally, assign people to help. Or investigate one of the many services available that can empower you with remote-monitoring abilities.
4. Visit a tradeshow. There’s no substitute for kicking the tires in person. Visiting a show is a great way to see the latest in technology and applications, and to hear industry experts and other deployers share their lessons. Another benefit: It will re-invigorate your enthusiasm for the technology.
5. Be nice to the people who work with the kiosks. It doesn’t matter how great your self-service technology is if you don’t have happy, helpful employees working for you, too. And since many workers see self-service as a threat, acknowledging their value becomes even more important. It’s a sad thing for a business when a customer leaves believing the kiosk was the friendliest help there.
Who knows whether you’ll follow-through with any of these. The main thing is to be aware there’s always something you could be doing better.
