Mark Raskino

When I walked into my local branch of Argos recently, I found a whole row of new self-service kiosks. There are regularly queues for the two self-service checkouts at the Tesco’s a couple of doors down. There are reports of a self service test at KFC in Wales and stories of Kiosk trial success at McDonalds have been steadily growing for several years.

Self-service kiosk technology isn’t new. It is robust, mature and so are we. Nobody is ‘scared’ of these touch screen devices anymore – just spend a few minutes looking at the demographics of the users at the supermarket self-service checkouts next time you visit.  But why are the minority of transactions conducted this way and why haven’t large corporations rolled the technology out more aggressively already?  After all – reports of order size uplift at fast food kiosks should have them drooling.

The broad answers are: scaling and necessity.  Trials and pilots run well and prove that the technology has potential in a context, but roll-out and full scale operations take a while to design and implement -  sometimes several years. You need to find ways of monitoring and supporting networks of these devices in the field cost effectively. Doable – but it takes a while. Reliability must be high and to achieve that many small teething problems overcome. For example many years ago I talked to a Kiosk designer who found a red sticky substance jamming the card reader device on a trial kiosk. It turned out that bored kids who loitered in that mall liked to feed half opened ketchup sachets in between the rollers ‘for fun’ – so he narrowed the slot. He could never have predicted that situation.

But its not just bored kids who delay progress, so do bored executives. It takes a lot to overcome the inertia of a large organization and start installing kiosks on a mass scale.  While the labour saving and cost reduction benefits may have been proven by early trials, management with other things to attend to often find that such time consuming automation projects just aren’t top of the list.  Maybe the store refurb program, the new product range, the refrigerated vehicle fleet upgrade and the China strategy took all their energies instead.

So business leaders need an incentive to take a recently matured cost savings business tool and start using it ‘to the max’.  Can anyone think of a reason they might suddenly be interested this year when they weren’t before?  In fact we have already seen an example of this happening this decade – in the airlines. It took the last recession, compounded by the effects of 9/11 to move the airlines up into full gear so that nowadays self-service check-in is the norm… even though successful trials of the technology were operating a full decade before that.

Maturing technologies can often sit around for a while simmering. Then, when business conditions change the need for them becomes more obvious and projects explode faster than your coffee shop server can repeat the words ‘small skinny double shot caramel macchiato’ to her colleague.  What we don’t know yet is just how many low to moderately skilled service sector jobs could be removed if retail and hospitality industry executives decide to push harder down the  self-service automation route in response to this recession.

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Category: Economy Innovation Management Recession     Tags: Automation, Jobs, Self-Service

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