The self-service solutions are dominating the service sector, the customers are also preferring intuitive self-service experience over traditional mode of service. The self-service solutions include interactive websites, mobile application and interactive self-service kiosks. The interactive self-service kiosks are gaining huge popularity in UAE. Businesses operating in Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and other regions of the country are eagerly seeking ways to align with customer needs and market trends. Here in UAE every one has access to internet and smartphones. Which over the time make the population more tech savvy, the convenience and control of digital interaction is one of the biggest appeal for self-service solutions.
This market trend drive the rapid adaptation of the interactive self-service kiosks. An interactive self-service kiosk is a computer terminal equipped with specialized peripherals and technologies that let the user access a service and perform an action without requiring any help from the staff. The self-service payment kiosk is also a version of the self-service kiosk but with additional features to allow users to perform transactional tasks and make payments. The self-service payment kiosks revolutionize the service delivery and payment processes. Majorly driven by the automation, the self-service payment kiosks have potential to greatly improve the efficiency, reduce operational cost and save a tons of resources.
In this blog we will discuss the role of self-service payment kiosks in reducing the operational costs, deriving efficiency by automation and its key benefits for businesses and customers. Regardless of what type or size your business has, and what services you are providing, if you take payments from customers at your service centers or business premises, the self-service payment kiosks can offer you a great competitive advantage in terms of cost reduction and elevating customer experience.
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What are the Interactive Self-Service Payment Kiosks?
The interactive self-service payment kiosks are interactive and automated machines which are specifically designed to enable users to perform transactions and have transactional interaction with business in a totally independent way, without requiring any help from the staff. The interactive self-service payment kiosks eliminate the need of cashier or service agent at various businesses such as retail stores, government offices, hospitals and healthcare, transportation sector, airports, public places, telecommunication and almost all across the service sector.
The interactive self-service payment kiosk comes with intuitive multi-lingual touch screen based UIs, multiple peripherals for verification or authentication, there are several payment devices (cash deposit, coin deposit, cash/change return, credit/debit card machines, contactless payments, digital payments, mobile payments, etc.), receipt printer, QR code/barcode reader and various other software and hardware components which makes them ideal for boosting efficiency and customer experience.
The self-service payment kiosks are widely used to for bill payments, utility services, retail shopping, food ordering, paying for government services, and various other application. The interactive self-service payment kiosks offer many benefits for both customers and businesses. The businesses in Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and all around the UAE are embracing self-service payment kiosks to achieve higher efficiency, better and personalized customer experience and operational cost reduction.
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How Interactive Self-Service Payment Kiosk Boost Efficiency?
The interactive self-service payment kiosks comes with a software application. The self-service payment kiosk software offers various useful tools and features to manage the customer experience. As the prime objective of self-service payment kiosk is to facilitate transactional interaction, there are several other systems that are integrated with the kiosk software. The kiosk software is a server-side application which is integrated with customer database, internal payment application, core business application, external payment gateways, POS solution, and various other business tools. This integration allow the self-service payment kiosks to automatically streamline the data flow between all relevant databases and application, reducing the time and efforts for a transaction and boosting efficiency.
The self-service payment kiosks also offer multilingual UI (user interface), on top of that the payment kiosk also offer on-screen prompts guiding the customer through each step of customer journey, and ensuring a smoother and quicker transaction. The transactions are processed instantly as the self-service payment kiosks is already integrated with all relevant systems and database. Furthermore the transaction is recorded and all the data in all relevant databases/systems get updated instantly. This entire operation is instant and fully automated, which greatly boost efficiency. This automated workflow eliminate the need of human staff, effectively reducing operational and human resource cost.
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How Interactive Self-Service Payment Kiosk Reduce Human Resource and Labor Cost?
They key to understand the true potential of an interactive self-service payment kiosks is to understand its capabilities of integration. The integration is done in many ways, mostly the self-service payment kiosk deals with very sensitive customer data and financial information. This data is usually stored within the core business application or the regulatory authorities. For example, if the customers are offered to sign-in via their Emirates ID, the ID data is authenticated by the regulated methods which are permitted by the government and citizen portals. If you need to verify the email or phone number, that kind of data is usually stored within the core business application CRM (customer relationship management system), or dedicated customer database.
Similarly if the customer is paying with their credit/debit card, the information is verified from the bank. This not only make system more secure but also super-efficient. Traditionally all these processes are done by the cashier, service agent or staff members, who have to perform several tasks to get this process done, which not only takes time but also a lot of efforts and resources. However, by automating this processes, businesses can not only reallocate the resources to more productive tasks, but also reduce the human resource. The human resource is one of the major expense, hiring, training and retaining employees have huge cost. Moreover the self-service payment kiosks can operate 24/7, further reducing the need of staff in multiple shifts and saving huge expenses for the organization.
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How Interactive Self-Service Payment Kiosks Increase Customer Satisfaction and Profitability?
The interactive self-service payment kiosks have incredible ability to automate and enhance various internal business processes. The automation where drives efficiency also offer many advantages which help elevating customer experience and increasing customer satisfaction. Happy and satisfied customers are a great asset for the businesses. According to several researches and studies, the satisfied customer tend to do repeated business, they are proven to be good brand advocate and help businesses minimizing their marketing and advertising expenses. In a traditional service center, the customers tend to wait in queues, then they have to explain everything to the service agent, and then the service agent takes time to solve the customer query. All this takes a great deal of time and efforts.
With the interactive self-service payment kiosks businesses can offer tons of information within the kiosk. The on-screen prompts and multilingual dashboards further simplify customer journey and eliminate the language barriers. Moreover the kiosk management software comes with integrated AI analytical engine which help businesses personalize the customer experience and journey. Businesses can also leverage the analytical data in decision making process to further align with customer needs and market trends. These features help businesses increase customer satisfaction. Happy and satisfied customers tend to do repeat business. Businesses can leverage the in-built tools to market new products/services or add-ons to increase the average sale size which is very profitable. The human resource cost reduction, higher customer loyalty and efficiency in business processes help increasing overall profitability.
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Why Interactive Self-Service Payment Kiosks Offer Higher ROI?
There is a common misconception that implementing interactive self-service payment kiosk is very expensive and sophisticated process. However, that is totally wrong, the upfront cost of the deployment might look high indeed, but the long term operational cost and benefits can far exceed the ROI of any other modern day IT solution. Businesses tend to utilize various IT solutions to streamline their day-to-day operations. The interactive self-service payment kiosks can easily fit in any kind of environment. These self-service payment kiosks are fully customizable, businesses can customize each and every feature as per their needs and internal processes. Hence the adoptability is relatively much better. Businesses can easily integrate these kiosks within their existing IT infrastructure. These kiosks offer simple API-based integration which is secure, have wider scope of application and have very less cost.
The interactive self-service payment kiosks are built on very flexible platforms, hence adding new features, new screens in UI, new features or integrating more applications is very cost-efficient. Businesses can also customize the system down the road to adopt to emerging conditions and changing trends in the market which increase the life-cycle of the self-service payment kiosk, adding value to the overall ROI. Moreover the operational and maintenance cost is extremely low, these kiosks doesn’t require much maintenance and can effectively operate 24/7, helping businesses reduce per-service delivery cost and saving a lot in terms of expenses. The customer loyalty also help making more sales and drive higher profits. All these features make interactive self-service kiosks more cost-efficient, especially when we consider their impact on sales, operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
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Conclusion
The interactive self-service payment kiosks are a revolutionary solution transforming the way businesses and customer interact for financial transactions. These kiosk have completely transformed the service sector landscape. Businesses in Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and all around the UAE are recording a surge in customers’ demand for digital interaction. The interactive self-service payment kiosk doesn’t only offer digital interaction but it also offer excellent service quality, which effectively increase customer satisfaction and happiness. The inherent properties of automation help driving superior efficiency in internal businesses processes and workflows. This efficiency help minimizing the need of human resource, which is major expense for businesses in service industry.
In UAE the population is very tech-savvy, this led to higher adaptation and huge popularity for interactive self-service solutions. The interactive self-service payment kiosk is one of the most effective, impactful and cost-efficient solution for customer-centric businesses. By automating various internal processes the service delivery time can be reduced greatly. Which resultantly impact on customer wait time and lead to higher customer happiness. Furthermore the interactive self-service payment kiosk’ software application can be integrated with existing IT infrastructure, which help optimizing various internal processes and help driving efficiency and performance. This automation greatly reduce the need of human resource and manual processes, which help cutting human resource and labor cost.
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The ability to offer intuitive and multilingual user interfaces, fully autonomous process, and 24/7 make these kiosks a valuable asset for the businesses. Businesses can also gain a great competitive advantage by leveraging self-service solutions. The biggest advantage of interactive self-service payment kiosks is it very flexible approach towards customization, scalability, and integration with AI, IoTs and other third-party business solutions. It is a win win situation for both as the customer can enjoy a significant reduction in wait time, and more personalized experience, while businesses can also leverage these kiosk to greatly improve customer satisfaction, increased sales and more future readiness.
The implementation of interactive self-service kiosks could be a great strategic move and can yield you great profit in coming years, effectively raising the ROI. The key advantages and features that we have discussed and a great potential of these interactive self-service payment kiosks position them as a vital asset for dealing with bigger challenges in future. In this blog we shed light on the role of self-service payment kiosk in reducing operational cost of a business. If you want to learn more or if you want our help to design and implement a bespoke interactive self-service payment kiosk solution for your organizations, please contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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