Payment functions now form an essential part of most kiosks and many business owners that have adopted these kiosks laud the ease at which customers can make transactions. The convenience of making payments via the postal service has been outmoded in favour of the superior convenience these kiosks have to offer but what happens after you’ve purchased a payment kiosk and how can you make exploit its full potential?
Placement
If a user can’t find your kiosk; they aren’t going to be able to use your kiosk but how exactly do you determine where best to locate your system?
Effectively, there are two main options as far as placement is concerned. You can either locate them within your own premises or you can carry out research as to where your existing customers are paying their bills – simple really.
If you have limited premises, then it would be best to opt for the research option as few locations will see your kiosks wasted. Ideally, you’ll want to assess your customer base and locate your kiosks within walking distance (if possible) of areas with a high concentration of your customers.
Marketing
Whether you’re investing a lot of money in marketing or not; you need to inform your customers that the kiosks will be available for their usage as soon as the units are rolled out. Make use of your existing marketing materials such as social media, websites and even television/radio advertising to reach the widest audience possible.
Maps highlighting the locations of your kiosks are always useful and digital signage is fast becoming the best way to get your message across – communicating is key.
Hardware
Your kiosks need to be as tough as you can afford for them to be purely because a broken kiosk is a useless kiosk – especially where making payments is concerned. The kiosks need to be weatherproof, shockproof and vandal-proof ideally to give you ultimate peace of mind.
Opt for a robust and reliable design and don’t scrimp on the cost – you’ll certainly recover your initial outlay in next to no time!
Downtime
Even if the hardware is ‘worldproof’, the software needs to be as reliable; if not more so. The software needs to be as close to crash-proof as possible – no code is 100% reliable but you can add in fail safes such as remote-monitoring and repair facilities that will remove the need for a member of maintenance staff to attend – cost effective.
Transaction Security
Bearing in mind that the users will be making payments via the kiosk; security is of paramount importance as far as transactions are concerned. The obvious solution to ensuring security is to make payments solely EMV (Chip and PIN) but this restricts flexibility for those who prefer cash or contactless payments.
All forms of payment can be accepted using the kiosk and security can be offered by providing unique transaction numbers and fitting a receipt printer to the kiosk in question – evidence that payment has been made.
Ideally, you’ll want to make the payment process as clear and as short as possible to reduce the potential for errors or user difficulties. Essentially, use the supermarket self- service check out model and have a staff member on hand if required during inset.
User Experience
If the user experience your kiosk offers is less satisfying than the postal or face-to-face options then why would anyone bother to use the kiosk? The user interface needs to be appealing, straight-forward and easy to use making simplicity key.
There is no set format your interface needs to run on but try and make it as familiar as possible to the user. Remember; there may be some users with vision impairments or hearing difficulties so ensure they are catered for with hearing loops/headphone sockets and increased text size options.