7th Annual Kiosk Benchmark Study

For this, our 7th Annual Kiosk Study, approximately 14,100 email invitations were sent to readers of RIS News, Hospitality Technology, Consumer Goods Technology and Vertical Systems Reseller magazines. Of these, 551 respondents entered the online survey. Only current or planned kiosk deployers were invited to complete the entire survey; those with no plans exited the survey after answering a few basic questions.

This is the first year that Hospitality, selected by 52% of our respondents with current or planned kiosk installations, has overtaken retail (with 40%) as the dominant vertical. Last year, Retail was cited by 41%, followed by Hospitality with 39%. The current boom in hospitality self-service looks set to continue, as the percentages of Hospitality respondents installing within the next 12 or 24 months are significantly higher than the equivalent percentages for Retail. As the most established vertical market for kiosks, Retail has less demand for new installations.

Improving customer service remains the key reason for deploying kiosks; over half of our survey respondents (61%) consider it to be "extremely important," up from 48% last year. In terms of important technologies, touch screens had 76% of respondents ranking them as either "extremely" or "somewhat important," followed by Internet connection, printers and credit card readers. Biometrics is starting to make inroads into kiosk deployments, and much potential is there for RFID in self-service devices, once prices come down for these technologies.