By Ken Musante
Napa Payments and Consulting
Self-serve kiosks are booming. From banking to healthcare to restaurants, employers are seeking ways to increase throughput while increasing customer satisfaction and lessening staffing costs. Kiosks are contactless and can increase order accuracy. Sure, you sacrifice upsell opportunities, but kiosks are not meant for all use cases. Fine dining would be a poor use case—.at this time.
A few weeks back, I posted the following on LinkedIn (bit.ly/3Txk1zu):
"California increased its minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 on April 1st. It was a big jump and thought to increase wages to a group of folk living at or below poverty levels.
"Yesterday I visited a McDonalds in Napa CA. Staff behind the counter no longer take orders. Customers are directed to self-serve kiosks.
"The kiosks only accept electronic payments. The unintended consequence of the law directly benefited the payments industry.....interesting."
I received more response to this post than any prior post by a large margin. Some folks commented on the political aspect and unintended consequences. I got a big laugh from Jeff Rochford, who said, "You lost me at a McDonald's in Napa."
Regardless of your political position, it's clear that the push to self-serve kiosks will increase card usage, and increasing labor costs and advancing technologies will continue to push kiosks at the point of sale. As an industry, we need to integrate and support self-serve devices and their unique form factors. There are a couple of ways to accomplish this.
The first is direct certification where we integrate a single device into a solution and certify it to both an authorization platform and card brands. In addition, the solution needs to be certified for the vertical. If you want to support restaurant tipping, retail, ecommerce, petroleum and lodging, separate certifications are needed for each vertical.
Doing so eliminates third-party fees, but is very costly. This solution is ideal for an ultra large platform with its own authorization center. In this context, the kiosk accepting device will only be enabled on that specific platform, so you need a very large sales force and target market to support the efforts. Clover’s Kiosk is an ideal example of a directly certified device with a custom form factor.
Another way to go is to leverage the certification of an existing gateway. The upside is if you integrate into a device that is already certified to a gateway, you may leverage all the existing certifications.
This opens up authorization centers and verticals the gateway has already certified. Moreover, the recertifications are the responsibility of the gateway. Sure, you will pay for it in an authorization fee, but you can pay for a gobs and gobs of authorizations before you recoup your sunk costs for direct certification.
Some devices even extend the certification of that device to a family of devices further increasing your options once integrated. The upside in functionality and versatility is enormous and, in most use cases, will outweigh the marginal cost decrease associated with a direct certification.
Obviously, when considering a self-serve kiosk, you need to think through the use cases and happy and unhappy customer journey. Form factor is critical, and you will often need to source both the payment-accepting device and the kiosk hardware separately to optimize for durability and cost. Reporting and remote health monitoring is also key to a successful kiosk strategy.
Although kiosks are meant to reduce labor, there need to be alarm mechanisms for communication and power issues. Chip failure needs continuous monitoring, and kiosks won't self-sanitize. Although kiosks are not good feedback receptacles, knowing that and providing customers an easy way to provide their feedback may offer guidance.That is not, however, a substitute for a well-designed tech trial. No customers want to "fail fast" on their dinner order.
Solution providers have ample ready-to-market kiosk solutions. Understanding your use case fully is key for solution development. Think about the required interactivity. A parking garage will not need associated pages, while a lunch menu may require additional navigation pages.
Consider where the terminal will be installed and the various physical conditions, lighting, screen visibility and temperature. Consider fail-overs in the event of power outage and communication issues. Ensure your solution will withstand both the elements and pre-elementary toddlers.
Provide for the needs of the visually impaired and access from a wheelchair. Consider the security of the buyers and their need for physical and informational security.
Certainly, this list may be daunting, but your successful implementation relies on planning, mapping, development, tech trial and beta. The earlier the issues are identified, the less impactful they will be. 
As founder of Humboldt Merchant Services, co-founder of Eureka Payments, and a former executive for such payments innovators as WePay, a division of JPMorgan Chase, Ken Musante has experience in all aspects of successful ISO building. He currently provides consulting services and expert witness testimony as founder of Napa Payments and Consulting, www.napapaymentsandconsulting.com. Contact him at kenm@napapaymentsandconsulting.com, 707-601-7656 or www.linkedin.com/in/ken-musante-us.
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