The fourth industrial revolution has arrived and brought with it cloud computing, the IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other buzzwords we’ve all heard in the last number of years. What’s coming next and what are the implications to business owners and consumers?
It’s evident that advanced human-machine interfaces are next. Self-ordering kiosks fit in to this category and in recent years, we’ve witnessed the expansion and use cases for such kiosks. For example, 10 years ago consumers would go to an airport and stand in a line to check in for their flight.
That behavior has changed dramatically as airports enabled mobile check-in and self check-in kiosks, resulting in the drastic reduction of airport personnel while dramatically improving the customer check-in experience.
During this same time period, banks improved on the original ATM to enable far greater capabilities including cash-handling, check-depositing, and other teller services. Those two vertical markets set the precedent for consumers becoming more comfortable with self-ordering technologies.
As Amazon and e-commerce companies in parallel broadened their adoption rates, they further trained consumers to expect a frictionless and speedy checkout process.
Consumers now expect this improved experience everywhere, whether they're online or in a store. As a result, we are seeing exponential demand from restaurants, retailers, and hospitality in a wide variety of venues. Initially, the early adopters of self-ordering kiosks were simply trying to improve customer experience. Kiosks are now viewed as a requirement rather than a necessity because of the human capital cost, increasing wage inflation, and extreme employee turnover rates.
Early adopters such as the top three quick-service restaurant brands discovered that kiosks provide the following key benefits: improved customer experience; increase in revenue and average ticket; and cost reduction and an increase in employee retention.
