Digitalization has changed consumer behavior to a great extent. We now live in a do-it-yourself world where people prefer having the independence to execute their own tasks. In light of this, public-facing devices such as digital kiosks have gained immense popularity. Once, the only digital kiosks that were known to the business world were the ATM machines.
However, today from shopping malls and grocery stores, to movie theatres, restaurants and hotels, digital kiosks are seen everywhere. With a surge in the adoption of digital kiosks, it is crucial for businesses to consider the implementation of efficient kiosk management software.
Businesses have found diverse ways of deploying public-facing devices in the form of interactive kiosks, self-help counters, digital signages and much more. Implementing digital kiosks helps businesses in improving their customer service. Digital kiosks help reduce customer wait times and businesses can deliver a good customer experience even when experiencing a staff shortage.
To extract the maximum benefits of digital kiosks, businesses must plan a strategy to streamline the deployment and management of these public-facing devices.
What is Kiosk Management Software?
Kiosk Management Software is a platform that allows businesses to gain visibility of their dispersed digital kiosks and manage them remotely. This software acts as a powerful tool for businesses to gain finer control of their digital kiosks. Since these devices are installed in public places and are unattended, they need to be secured and monitored at all times. Kiosk Management Software help businesses track the usage, performance and compliance violations of their digital kiosks remotely.
Why Does Your Business Need a Kiosk Management Software?
Implementing public-facing kiosks or digital signages helps businesses engage their customers better. If you are planning to implement public-facing digital devices of any kind, it is important that you understand the importance of adopting kiosk management software.
Key reasons why your business should adopt a kiosk management software:
1. Cost-Effectiveness
Kiosk management software is a comprehensive platform that offers an extensive feature set for businesses to manage diverse aspects of their digital kiosks. It acts as an all-in-one solution for kiosk management. Businesses need not invest in separate content management, remote monitoring and management, and device analytics tools to manage their kiosks. Also, since kiosk management solutions allow remote management of multiple kiosks from a single console, it saves businesses from investing in a large IT team. Even smaller IT teams can efficiently manage multitudes of kiosk security and monitoring tasks from the dashboard.
2. Cross-Platform Support
All businesses, depending on their dynamic requirements juggle between various OS types. Android, Apple and Windows are the leading operating systems that extend a plethora of business-critical features. Kiosk management software generally supports the management and monitoring of all the major OS types from a single unified console. When you have deployed Android and iOS kiosks or Windows-based digital signages, you can implement a single solution to manage them all.
3. Higher Productivity
Kiosk Management Software helps businesses to automate and streamline their kiosk operations remotely. IT teams of businesses can save a considerable amount of time and effort spent in otherwise manually configuring and reconfiguring digital kiosks. Implementing a powerful tool that speeds up processes and automates routine IT tasks leads to increased IT productivity.
4. Reinforced Corporate Security
With the growing technological advancement, cybercrimes are becoming more sophisticated than ever. Businesses are forced to take extra security measures to safeguard their corporate data against breaches. Digital kiosks being unattended and placed in public locations are most prone to intentional or accidental data breaches. Kiosk Management Software enables businesses to push a variety of device, data and network security settings on their digital kiosks.
5. Remote Management
Whether it is configuring security settings on the kiosks, or pushing diverse content files on the digital signages, running routine system updates or fixing kiosk issues, IT admins of businesses can execute all these activities remotely. Kiosk Management Software saves on-site IT efforts. IT admins no longer need to sprint between different locations to fix minor technical glitches.
6. Improved Customer Experience
Imagine your digital kiosk running into an error or abruptly shutting down when your customers are using it. Kiosk Management Software helps businesses always to keep an eye on their digital kiosks. You can constantly monitor the performance and usage of your digital kiosks to ensure that they are maintained at their best health. In case any kiosk runs into an error, you can instantly detect and resolve it without letting it hamper your user’s experience.
Business Benefits of Scalefusion Kiosk Management Software
It is crucial for businesses to pick the right Kiosk Management software for their business. Choosing a comprehensive solution that offers a feature-packed platform to help IT admins streamline the versatile operations on their kiosks is the key.
Scalefusion MDM is a Kiosk Management Software that helps goes beyond basic kiosk management and allows businesses to leverage powerful features to minimize their device management efforts.
1. Kiosk Lockdown
It admins can lock their commercial Android, iOS or Windows devices into the Kiosk mode to turn them into dedicated kiosks. The single-app kiosk mode allows your device to be locked into just 1 app. Every other app and settings on the device are disabled. Similarly, you can also configure the multi-app kiosk mode to allow more than one app to run on the kiosk. You can leverage the single-app mode to lock a particular browser on your kiosk to enable Kiosk Browser Lockdown.
When deploying public-facing kiosks or digital signages, businesses can benefit the most from Scalefusion’s single-app kiosk mode. It prevents users from misusing the device and manipulating the settings.
2. Secure Web-Browsing
There’s a type of kiosk called the internet kiosk which is installed by hotels, airports, etc. to help users browse the internet. Every IT admin would agree that surfing the internet presents countless security risks. Malware, adware, spyware, trojans, viruses, the internet is filled with malicious sites that are designed to hack into the corporate networks.
Scalefusion allows IT admins to allow or block specific websites on their kiosks. This prevents the digital kiosks from being taken over by lurking malicious actors and also protects the business data stored on these devices.
3. Content Management
In order to engage customers successfully, kiosks need to display or provide information of diverse kinds. IT admins of businesses can remotely push content files of various formats such as videos, images, presentations, etc. on their digital kiosks. This saved IT efforts in making rounds to various kiosk sites and uploading or changing the content manually.
4. Silent App Installation
Provisioning your digital kiosks is an underrated IT task. Today, all digital devices are powered by the internet and the right set of mobile apps. Scalefusion lets IT admins push apps from the Google PlayStore, Apple App Store and the Windows Business Store on your Android, iOS or Windows devices remotely. You can also push your in-house apps using the Scalefusion Enterprise Store.
Distributing apps is just half the work done. Scalefusion also lets IT admins schedule automated app updates and manage app configurations from the dashboard.
5. Security Against Misuse
Digital signages are devices that are locked down in a single-app mode to serve the sole purpose of displaying content. Diverse industries use these devices to display their business-related content such as advertisements, hotel room availabilities, hotel menus, online discounts, offers and much more. In order to efficiently and constantly display the business content on loop, it is mandatory that the settings on these devices remain unchanged.
Scalefusion allows IT admins to disable hardware buttons and device peripherals such as power-off buttons, USB ports, back buttons, etc. to ensure that customers do not misuse these devices.
6. Network Security
Digital kiosks are installed by businesses for various purposes and rely heavily on the internet to execute various operations. IT admins can configure VPN on their kiosks to ensure a secure and encrypted network connection. This simple strategy goes a long way in preventing the kiosks from untrusted connections.
7. Remote Support
No matter how many security configurations you push on your kiosks, ultimately these devices are meant to be used by the public. It is natural for these kiosks to run into technical errors once in a while. Businesses cannot completely prevent kiosk issues, but you can try to resolve them at the earliest to ensure that your customer experience is not affected. Scalefusion allows IT admins to leverage the Remote Cast & Control feature from the Scalefusion dashboard, to virtually resolve device issues. IT admins can also take screen recordings and generate context-aware ITSM tickets for faster issue resolution.
Read More: Scalefusion Kiosk Features
Closing Lines
Self-service is today’s reality. Digital kiosks help businesses improve their customer experience by allowing customers to take charge of their processes and not rely on the on-site staff or wait in long queues. It is a win-win strategy that allows businesses to keep their customers happy and their employees productive. All you need to do is to pick the right Kiosk Management Software to make the most of your digital kiosks.
