Depends on who you talk to, I guess. If you believe this doomsday YouTube rant by the always-animated Jim Cramer, host of MSNBC’s “Mad Money”, (and if I were you, I’d check it out because it’s pretty darn funny toward the end) then you’re probably ready to make a run on the bank and hide in your bomb shelter.
On the other hand, as I write this, the stock market just closed with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up over 200 points at 12849.
Unlike so many other things in life, the state of the economy often depends solely upon your perception of it.
But there are few things that are eminently clear: Gas prices are up, food prices are up and it’s fairly likely that consumers – and retailers – in the future are going to be watch-dogging their wallets like Ebenezer Scrooge in a Dollar Store. What’s more, watching the stock market vacillate between the nosebleed section and the abyss on a day-to-day basis reminds me of that time in the eighth grade when I got stuck on the back seat of the pirate ship ride at King’s Island. You know, the one where the ship keeps swinging back and forth and your stomach and esophagus switch places?
Something is amiss and we can’t blame it on what Ben Bernanke had for lunch anymore. (FYI, it’s now a week after I first started writing this, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 190 points, but gas is at $3.75 a gallon.)
So some people in the self-service industry – whether they’ll admit it or not – are quietly asking: What would happen to the industry if the economy goes sour, or even slips into recession? Will we see fewer self-service deployments or more?
I’m not an economist, but I’m willing to bet the latter. (FYI, the stock market just plummeted 115 points. Hey look – oil is $123 a barrel!) After all, business has been, is and always will be about the bottom line.
And self-service helps the bottom line.
Retailers that deploy self-service are able to save on labor costs. Airlines can staff fewer attendants wherever self-service check-in kiosks are deployed. Self-checkout terminals at Meijer mean human cashiers are becoming an endangered species by the midnight hour. And just imagine how much cheaper it is to staff the electronics department when you’ve got a fleet of photo kiosks in place.
True, the initial investment cost of a widespread self-service deployment can be substantial, but it’s just a one-time investment. Cost-conscious retailers that have never entered the space may be hesitant to take the plunge for the first time if they see the value of the dollar continue to plummet, the Dow Jones fall several hundred points or the cost of gas rise to $126 per barrel (the latter of which just happened for the first time this morning.) But I think the reluctant ones will be in the minority.
That’s my opinion, anyway. But then I’m not an analyst. Kerry Bodine of Forrester Research is – one who focuses on retail customer experience.
Like anyone these days, she’s hesitant to predict either sunny skies or doom and gloom for any industry in the economy before us. I asked her about my armchair theory that a recession would cause companies to consider replacing human labor with self-service technology. She offered a more tempered assessment.
“It might – it might – present some new business to the industry,” said Bodine. “There’s certainly that possibility and there are certainly firms that may think that. Whether or not I think it’s going to be a boon to the self-service industry, I can’t go as far as to say that.”
What she worries about is a downturn in the quality of self-service deployments as companies eager to cut costs in a tight economy might decide to shortcut certain design processes and make a beeline straight for assembly and deployment. Design is something Bodine says some kiosk manufacturers have a hard enough time focusing on in a good economy – in a sub-standard one, she says it’s almost certain to suffer.
“I spend a lot of time looking at the kiosk industry, and compared with other self-service technology channels like the Web, the kiosk industry is really far behind in terms of understanding some of these design processes and methodologies,” she said.
Specifically, she’s referring to methodologies that focus on identifying and pleasing the prospective kiosk user, such as conducting ethnographic research, usability testing, focus groups and analytics. Unfortunately, she says some kiosk deployers and manufacturers have such a tenuous grasp of R&D that they don’t know which methodologies to use.
“If you want to know if your system is easy to use, you can’t run a focus group to find that out. That’s something that I do see in the kiosk industry a lot,” she said. “They use focus groups for everything because it’s really the one primary tool that they understand. Instead you should either be conducting an expert review…running a usability lab test – there are a lot of ways to evaluate usability, but not through a focus group.”
Bodine fears the economy may drive some companies to eliminate usability testing altogether and rush substandard deployments to market. She says this approach could seriously hurt the industry.
“If they’re not building something that people are going to want to use in the first place, that whole investment is for naught,” she said. “It’s really about two things: Design the right thing, and design the thing right. All of that just takes a really good understanding of user-centered design process, and I do think that’s a challenge for the kiosk industry.
“The firms that are going to make it…are the firms that can really tie whatever application they’re working on with real business methods. The firms that can put some rigor on that, I think, probably don’t have much to worry about.”
So I guess the moral of the story – on this day when the Dow is now down 126 points – is that consumers will always want good products. They’re not going to spend their hard-earned dollars on a self-service solution that doesn’t fit their needs perfectly. If – and I emphasize if – the economy does sink into a recession, we’re all going to be looking for costs to cut.
But research and development shouldn’t be one of them.
