Self service is perhaps the latest innovation in service delivery technology. It helps businesses add an additional medium or channel to provide goods and services to their customers. In this day and age, a business cannot stay afloat with just one channel to service customers, especially if that channel is a brick and mortar store.
Self service has become an essential part of service delivery strategies for businesses in many industries such as banking, telecom, quick service restaurants and even retail stores. The benefits of technology are undeniable and infinite. Lets take a look at 5 of the major benefits self service technologies provide to businesses that deploy them effectively.
True Omnichannel Experience
Businesses that rely on just a brick and mortar store will struggle to stay in business if they don’t have additional channels to meet their customers where they are. They should be present online and additionally should offer self service options as well to their customers. This will make sure that businesses can reach their customers no matter how they choose to access services.
This creates a true omnichannel customer experience with maximum accessibility over a variety of different channels. For example, a telecom service provider can deploy self service SIM dispensing kiosks with pre-staged QR transactions so that customers can perform majority of the transaction within an app on their phone and when they arrive at the kiosk they present their unique QR code to complete the transaction and receive their new or replacement SIM card instantly.
No More Queues
The addition of self service kiosks to any business will divert the load of work from human staff to the kiosks meaning long queues would virtually disappear and cashiers and tellers would be able to better service customers alongside the self service technology. Self service also takes less time than a human to service each customer so more customers can be serviced in the same timeframe.
A great example of this can be seen a banks. Bank tellers spend majority of their time dealing with and processing deposits, be it cash or check. Bank branches can install cash & check deposit kiosks to lessen the stress on tellers so they can focus on more skillful tasks that require human attention. This eliminates the long queues you would normally have to experience at your local bank branch.
Not Limited by Office Hours
Businesses can install self service kiosks outside their physical stores and in other public locations with heavy footfall such as malls and shopping centers. This way customers can access that business’s services whenever they want; outside of business hours and even on weekends. Research has shown that 60% of all transactions happen outside of normal operating hours.
Imagine all the revenue your business is missing out on by limiting hours from 9-5. Now, you don’t have to imagine, nor do you have to miss out on what would otherwise be an opportunity cost of not having self service deployments.
Reduce Operational Costs
Self service kiosks have also proven to reduce costs and increase average order value as well as revenues in the long run. Yes, the initial cost is high, but compare it to the cost of opening a new physical location; paying rent, hiring and training employees, paying salaries, fixtures and so on. Plus a self service kiosk is essentially serving the purpose of a branch and expanding the existing network of branches.
For the cost of setting up one store at one location, you could probably set up a whole network of self service kiosks in ten different public locations and reach an exponential number of customers. Self service kiosks are a great investment as they typically breakeven and become profitable within 4-8 months.
Safe & Secure
Most self service solutions providers these days offer bank grade security with their kiosk solutions which means that the kiosks use the same technology to validate and verify currencies and payments. These kiosks also often have KYC capabilities built into them to perform identity checks and verifications against local customer identity and national identity databases.
KYC protocols use cameras and fingerprint sensors to collect biometric data of customers and cross reference that data against existing databases to make sure no one is committing fraud or identity theft. This kind of technology is used by banks and telecoms to help onboard new customers which can now be made possible via self service kiosks.
In Conclusion…
Ever since the pandemic, self service has taken the world by storm and many businesses have invested heavily into it. There are self service options in nearly every industry today and customers are loving it. Customers have gotten so used to it, that everywhere they go they expect self service options and when they don’t find it, they take their business elsewhere.
Self service is the competitive edge that helps businesses increase their market share and stay relevant in today’s cutthroat business landscape.
