What’s the founding story or inspiration behind Kiosk?
It’s a global brand – the kiosk information systems headquarters based out of US Colorado. We design, manufacture, and sell customer-specific kiosks, but also standard kiosks to various verticals and applications. That is the business model. The core initiation and trigger point for that business is to serve the market with fully compliant and application-specific, respectively customer-specific, self-service kiosk devices. That’s the idea. Paired with after sales services, we call it field services to install and maintain such systems, self-service devices, self-service kiosk in the field at the end point.
How do you balance your intuitive design with the more advanced functionality of your kiosks?
Typically, the process is defined mutually with the customer in scope of work. We run a design workshop. We understand all necessities of the application in terms of functionality, in terms of components to be integrated, but also in terms of design, look and feel, CI requirements. This could be a nice process or typically it’s a few days process to define and mutually agree on the scope of work of what needs to be done. After that, the next step is to come up with rendering proposals to the customer. So it’s a digital way to visualise what has been discussed in the scope of work and to discuss the look and feel, the attractiveness of the product, the productivity of the product, the serviceability of the product, and then agree on such a rendering before moving into the next step like fast prototyping. This could be done via 3D print or with a real prototype or two or three in order to fine-tune the requirements before taking off volume production.
How have you seen the demand evolve for self-service in hotels over the recent years?
The overall thesis is digitalisation. So that paired with missing resources, which are the two major factors striving for growth in the self-service applications. You can see that as we all know it from day to day living at the airport with the self-check in kiosk, and also, for example, at the quick-serve restaurants. We do it at the kiosk. So this is a natural way to inhale and to accept such a digital device to cooperate with, you can say. So and this emphasis and this philosophy is well accepted, for example, in the hotel business. So after COVID or also during COVID period, there has been a major downturn on available resources available for receptionists and concierge. And this is exactly the point to streamline the processes from being very handy and manual and human to offload this wherever it’s possible into a digitalised process. So the demand is being created by the needs in the market, but also to reflect the modern way of handling customers. Like in the hotel industry, the key factor is the guest. It’s not a device, it’s the guest. So people want to have the guests feel comfortable and have a modern way of checking in and checking out. He can choose if he goes to the human receptionist or to such a Kiosk device, but you need to offer it and that’s driving the demand. Other industries is similar. You can see in quick-serve restaurants is a big trend. Also, not only on the big chains, but also smaller chains. In order to make sure that the customer feels well accepted and it’s comfortable to place the order and get the product.
How would Kiosk handle updates to the technology or maintenance of the kiosks for hotel clients?
One is to maintain and take care of the hardware after sales, over the years to come after sales, after integration, after implementation. Typically we have service level agreements lined up with the customers. So if something would fail, then we have service technicians to go to the endpoint and fix it. Or with the hotline, technical hotline support to to to make it happen from remote. This is number one. And number two there is certainly that over time, application changes, they evolve, they’re getting a new look and feel. They’re having new functionalities: you have os operating system changes so the idea here is very clear to install remote management software. All the products we ship have a kernel or you can say their client installed and you can enable that client remotely in order to install new software devices, new software versions, to install new parameters, to set new parameters, to control the monitor of the unit in terms of health, but also to integrate a workflow. For example, if you imagine there is a printer included in the PR system and the paper is running out, to be able to send an email or some kind of a message to a concierge or to some people taking care of that situation and with this we install a workflow which is, you know, which is maintaining the unit as per the needs.
How do you think your solutions help hotels in particular manage sort of peak season in terms of check-ins and reducing wait times?
If we all envision the situation that we are checking in as a business person and we see a long chain of people and we need to wait 30 minutes to get the check-in. That is where it’s getting very obvious to install such a device. So it’s an increase of check-in bandwidth at very, very low cost compared to additional human resources. So human resources are very personal and you have flair. That is the good part of it, but they cost a lot of money and social security, and then the sick leaves, and so on. Such a unit is running 24-7 and offers the service in terms of check-in. And you can scale the check-in bandwidth as much as you want. Those are very clear advantages and how to increase the bandwidth.
