One of the things the retail world likes about kiosks is their consistency. Kiosks don’t get an attitude with an unpleasant customer, and more importantly, they don’t bend or break the rules for persuasive or abusive customers. This is especially important to those of us in financial services, where fraud is often perpetrated by using “human engineering” techniques. 

If you build it right, everyone gets the same good experience at your kiosk. This was especially true for me over the holidays.

It was December 26 and my husband and I were trying to fly home to the west coast from Wisconsin. The underwear bomber and a winter snow storm were conspiring against us.

We, along with nearly one hundred other people, had been waiting in a small airport for over 12 hours to get a flight - any flight out of there. It was the usual litany of announcements of mechanical delays, weather, etc. We all knew it wasn’t the gate agent’s fault, but tempers were running thin, especially since the last restaurant in the airport had closed at 5:30 p.m. At 12 midnight, we were told our plane was coming from Chicago and once it landed we’d board and be on our way!

At 12:30 a.m., our hopes were dashed. The crew on our plane had just exceeded their hours and needed a nap or something. The last flight - our last hope - was cancelled. We were no longer travelers, we were a mob.

We got into line to talk with the one gate agent left in the airport (the other employees had gone home hours earlier to be with their families). Babies were crying and so were their children. People wanted to vent and they did. The mob even got the satisfaction of making the agent burst into tears and crumple into a sobbing heap on the baggage carrier – wow, that felt good, but hey, wait a second, she was our only hope of getting out of here … oops … now what do we do?

Being firm believers in self-service, my husband and I didn’t let our time in the line go to waste. We were on the phone to the airline making flight arrangements out of a different airport. They weren’t ideal, but we took them and thought we might be able to convince the ticket agent (once she composed herself) to look for better options out of that airport. 

When I spotted the airline kiosk I thought I would try to change the tickets myself. It worked! My husband waited in line while I ran over to the kiosk and changed flights out of the new airport. We would be home early the next morning! As I ran back, I could see that the agent had resumed her post and was talking with my husband. Since we had already gotten our own tickets, we were pretty easy to deal with – the agent kept thanking us for being so nice. We didn’t even have to ask for a flight coupon for the inconveniences; she gave us each a $300 coupon, plus meal vouchers, plus bus fare to the other airport, plus taxi fare to the bus station. 

Clearly there are some things that only a human can do for a customer. In our case, it was show appreciation and sincere regret over the inconvenience we had experienced. 

The kiosk, on the other hand, never broke down in tears. It didn’t need to take a nap, clock out or call its family. The kiosk got us our tickets home.

The line, “if you build it, they will come,” makes for a great movie trailer about a half-crazed baseball fan, but when you are contemplating a kiosk deployment, you probably need more to go on. 

When Financial Service Centers Cooperative, Inc. (FSCC) decided to link its financial services network to 7-Eleven’s® 2,100 advanced function kiosks – V-coms®  we did not have the luxury of direct research or past experience to go on.  Putting complex financial transactions on a kiosk in a convenience store was such a leap, I’m still thinking, “How on earth did we do that?!” 

Manage Expectations
One of our biggest challenges was that putting financial transactions on a kiosk looked a lot like building an ATM network.  Would our client credit unions understand the difference or worse, would consumers be confused?  Our strategy was to acknowledge the perceived similarities, but then follow up with the differences – repeatedly.  Fortunately, consumers were not confused – they loved the consistent convenience, but it was a tough go for persons within our industry whose only frame of reference was ATMs.

Despite our communication strategy, there were some particularly difficult moments.  One trade writer just couldn’t grasp that there was something better than a deposit taking ATM.  Finally I told him “David, I’m not articulate enough to describe the differences.  Please go use one of the units and see for yourself.”   He called back three times to tell me how the units were going to positively change his relationship with his credit union and how he’d never had that kind of convenience before in his life.  Sometimes expectations can only be managed by experience.

Do Your Research – Join SSKA
I was not aware of the Self-Service and Kiosk Association (SSKA) when we began our project.  If we had been a member then, I could have saved myself significant time, resources and stress by using their vast store of research.  Just as important, I would have had access to kiosk professionals in other industries who could have helped me understand the technology, equipment, and potential problems we faced. 

Know Your Users – Everybody Loves Convenience
We knew our biggest users would likely be Gen X and Y and focused our marketing on those groups.  Although we are still gathering data, we are finding that older consumers are repeatedly using the kiosks as well. SSKA’s report on Consumer Attitudes Toward Self-Service is helping to explain this trend by pointing toward control, consistency and convenience as drivers.  Everybody loves convenience.

I’m all for more convenience and less stress, how about you?