Kiosk Benchmark Study: Step Right Up — Kiosks Command Attention Across Verticals

This year's overall data indicates increased user acceptance of self-service and kiosks, as well as growing budgets and deployment sizes. For the first time, all of this year's responses were crosstabulated with our respondents' vertical markets in order to contrast the differing priorities and stages of growth and deployment for the various kiosk markets. As in previous years, the majority of our respondents came from the retail and hospitality verticals, followed by consumer goods manufacturing.

A new feature in this year's study was the inclusion of a separate question bank directed specifically toward the value-added reseller. The results of this survey are discussed in detail on page 25 in Section IV: The Solution Provider's Role.

Companies with no plans to deploy kiosks were asked about their reasons and their previous kiosk experience (if any). As in last year's study, the number one reason remains ‘needed application doesn't exist', but just 27% chose this option, as opposed to 40% last year. ‘No budget' remained the second biggest choice, with 26% both this year and last, but the notion that ‘kiosks are impersonal and reduce the level of customer service' has gone from 22% last year to just 12% this year. This shows the changes that are taking place both in the numbers of available kiosk applications and in the overall perception of kiosks and their place in the service sector.

We investigated the relative penetration of kiosks in the different verticals by cross tabulating the responses. Retail has 49% already installed, and 35% in the process of installing, 33% planning to install within 12 months, and 30% planning within 24 months. For hospitality, just 30% have already installed, with the numbers climbing to 53% currently in the process of installing, 44% planning to install within 12 months, and 57% planning within the next 24 months. As our data indicates, retail is the established kiosk market, with more growth expected in hospitality. We will continue to track this development in next year's study to see if hospitality overtakes retail as the burgeoning market for kiosks.