Leveraging data from kiosks to improve customer service

When customers use digital kiosks to study your products, they are potentially providing important data points as to their preferences.

The use of digital kiosks is a two-way street of information. As your customers research your products on these large and engaging displays, you also learn about their preferences and the trends that are most prominent among consumers at large.

This could represent a breakthrough for your business, as this data will allow you to tune and modify services to suit the market, as it exists at the moment and change those tactics over time. This is a more direct route to gather information than the outdated survey model. Instead of heavily filtered opinions after the fact, you learn what it is that excites your customers right away.

"When insight-gathering is hard-wired into your customer kiosk software, you can easily act on the insights contained in each day's usage."

Information out, information in
To generate a realistic picture of which of your offerings are resonating with clients, you have to give people access to a wide variety of options. This is where digital kiosks enter the picture, with each of your products on display in a convenient format. Whether you're selling new cars, appliances, electronics or anything in between, the ability to place your entire line of products in an easy-to-view package, which can include immersive multimedia available at the swipe of a hand, gives you an infinitely large digital showroom.

Now that you've offered digital access to all of the available products, it's time to process the results and see what clients really want. If a particular option is seeing a lot more attention than the rest, that's a surefire sign to stock more of that product for quick sales turnaround resulting in increased customer satisfaction. When this insight gathering is hard-wired into your customer kiosk software, you can easily act on the ideas contained in each day's usage.

Today's young shoppers have become used to dealing with companies through self-guided digital means, independently researching what they buy before taking the plunge. You have the ability to mine data from that behavior online and, with the addition of digital kiosks to your showroom, that same capability passes into the physical retail realm. Capturing client actions and opinions is important - that data is a form of business currency today, so you should collect and make use of it without hesitation. Using the information effectively to improve your customer's next interaction will only provide a better customer experience.

Data about customer preferences is set to become a retail fixture.

The future demands data
Moving toward a more curated, data-driven type of retail experience may become industry standard in the next few years. As The Drum recently reported, this was a topic at the South By Southwest Interactive panel discussion on the future of marketing technology. The source reported that harnessing the information associated with each customer's preferences is "the future of retail," and several large brands have already made purposeful moves toward learning from data.

The source noted that the event didn't declare the end of brick-and-mortar retail. Instead, the panel found that stores can continue to prosper in physical spaces as long as they deliver what their customers are looking for and create experiences that make those shoppers feel they are "special." Gathering data is a strong basis for efforts to please consumers, as without a solid amount of information on what those clients are looking for, product selection and advertising efforts may end up out of touch with actual preferences.