Chapter #8 - Prepping Your Kiosk for the Real World

Marie VanDrisse is back with the next chapter of her kiosk development story. In case you happened to miss 'em, you can check out the previous chapters here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Chapter #8 - Prepping Your Kiosk for the Real World

Planning your kiosk roll out should be a common task in your kiosk program, but many times this is a valuable step that isn't taken.

The kiosk may have been carefully designed and engineered. You might have had a prototype made and had all the peripherals checked out for compatibility. Your manufacturer may have even set up your prototype at its facility and everything is working properly.

If everything is working properly, roll out should be a breeze, right? Wrong. The "real world" is a very different can of worms than your manufacturer's shop floor.

I once had a customer suggest that we set up its kiosk in our facility, test it by having our production team place orders for the concept's food offerings for a couple of days, and then evaluate the functionality of the kiosk based on the test run. However, the more we talked about the idea, the more pitfalls we discovered.

To start, we quickly identified that the normal dayparts that the concept operated during couldn't be duplicated within our facility's operating hours. We also realized that the ebb and flow of traffic to the kiosk would be quite different, too, because our production team has scheduled breaks throughout the day. There would likely be a mad rush during break times and the lunch hour. In a mall setting, typically traffic is more sporadic and spread out throughout the day, with the possibility of a slight rush (generally no more than 10 customers in line at a time) around lunch and dinner hours -depending on the type of fare you serve.

Our production facility, without a doubt, isn't set up like a mall either. In a mall, an employee may have to replenish stock from a kitchen/storage area away from the kiosk. Testing the kiosk in our facility wouldn't help our customer understand how many employees would be needed to service the kiosk. There was no way to determine the amount of time spent outside of the kiosk getting inventory and whether one employee could work the kiosk for an extended period of time.

Lastly, our production team didn't match the customer profile that the concept was trying to target, so there was no way to really measure the utility of the prep stations and tell if there was enough room to assemble menu items.

What it all came down to was that no matter how we tried to simulate the kiosk environment, there was no way we could recreate the experience of an actual customer ordering the product under normal operating conditions. Therefore, we wouldn't be able to really determine if the kiosk "worked." For that, the client needed a pilot program, which is what I'll be discussing in my post. So be sure to stop by next month to find out how to pilot a kiosk project for testing a concept.


-Marie VanDrisse (Connect with me on LinkedIn.)