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Beyond the kiosk

Meet Kite – the new end-to-end interactive kiosk management and digital signage solution from Altron BMS.

Johannesburg, 05 Sep 2019

In a continued quest to deliver innovation and technology services that matter, Altron Bytes Managed Solutions has developed a flexible kiosk management and digital signage solution that allows retailers, financial institutions and the like to develop, maintain and better manage their in-house kiosk applications and digital signage offerings.

“To write an application for a kiosk is simple enough, especially if it’s meant for download on a single machine. The moment you start scaling that up, however, and you have 1 300 devices around the country, the download of content and applications becomes more complex. That’s where the Kite kiosk management and digital signage solution comes in,” explains Altron BMS Retail Presales Consultant Anand Pillay.

Kite can deploy a number of interactive applications that offer complementary products and services to customers in various sectors. One such example is the ‘build an order’ application, suited to the retail market: “Should a customer want to order from the deli counter at their local supermarket with the ‘Build an Order’ application, they simply swipe their loyalty card at the kiosk or key in their mobile number and place their order," says Pillay. "The kiosk prints out a slip and the customer continues shopping. Once the order is ready, the customer receives a notification on their phone, presents the slip at the deli counter and collects their order.”

Another Kite application suited to retail is the management of customer loyalty programmes – from customer enrolment right through to the issuing of vouchers and rewards.

Using Kite, retailers with a national footprint can offer location-specific specials and in-store campaigns with content running at selected stores only. “You could play a totally different application in KZN to what’s being shown in Gauteng or the Western Cape, for instance,” explains Pillay, “as Kite would centrally control the distribution of regional content, including attract loops and application pages across the allotted number of devices, while tracking and measuring use and effectiveness, including the generation of reports.”

On the topic of attract loops – the intro videos or screen shots on kiosks that essentially show customers what’s on offer – these loops can be used as effective revenue generators, with retailers sharing product advertising for reimbursement by suppliers. “You can even connect kiosks to VAS gateways that offer airtime and electricity – all of these things are possible,” adds Pillay.

Another plus point of the Kite solution is that a kiosk could be made to switch applications depending on the time of day, alternating from a customer-facing to an HC function, for example. Pillay illustrates: “Assuming that a store trades from 8am to 5pm every day, during that time you’d want your loyalty programmes and other store offers to run. Then, after closing, the kiosk automatically switches over to an HC application so employees can print timesheets and finalise other store admin, complete with customisable user access.”

From a security perspective, while Kite allows you to easily distribute content and run multiple user-friendly applications, it also allows you to securely lock down the environment with secure browser interfaces, URL restrictions and surf control to prevent unauthorised access to the kiosk operating system or your network, “specifically in the instance of a bank or big retailer – you don’t want anyone accessing information they shouldn’t, which makes the lockdown important”, says Pillay.

As for housekeeping, Kite also monitors the state of health of a kiosk, recognising if it’s down, out of paper, cannot see the network, etc. “Furthermore, while many of the current kiosks out there require the IT department to manage everything, our system is fully user driven by user ID and password; you access a Web portal and sign in. So if you’re in marketing, for instance, you can set up all the media content while IT does the monitoring. This way, the responsibilities are split and now lie where they should. Workflow is made simpler and more effective,” explains Pillay.

Possibly the biggest advantage and drawcard of the Kite kiosk management solution offering is that it’s locally built using best-of-breed technology. “All skill sets, development and support is local, for both the infrastructure and the applications, to help facilitate ease of customisation and simple integration of peripherals,” says Pillay.

Clients purchase the infrastructure with pre-packaged applications such as the customer loyalty programmes, build an order and queue management, while add-on applications can be written for them to meet their unique needs. “We can write the add-on applications or the clients can also do it themselves if they wish,” explains Pillay. “Like we said at the very beginning, Kite is designed to help clients develop, maintain and better manage their in-house kiosk applications and digital signage offerings, so they in turn can offer their customers an enhanced service experience.”

www.bytesms.co.za

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Editorial contacts

Anand Pillay
Retail Presales Consultant
(071) 471 6142
anand.pillay@bytes.co.za