Why Your Retail Business Needs A Kiosk Survey

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In the world of retail, a new type of customer feedback survey is rapidly taking over: Introducing the kiosk survey.

Forget receipt surveys or email surveys, which only collect feedback well after the customer has left your store, and consider for a moment the advantages of capturing customer sentiment in the moment. Not only are customers more likely to remember the details of their experience, but you don’t have to rely on them to head home and plug in a survey URL.

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What is a kiosk survey?

You may have seen a kiosk survey at your favorite coffee shop, grocery store or shoe store. Generally they are displayed on an iPad or Android tablet and mounted on a kiosk stand. They are visually appealing with a main image, often enticing customers to complete the survey with an incentive displayed on the main screen.

In order to create a kiosk survey, you’ll need to download a kiosk app. In addition to surveying your customers, don’t forget to also collect their contact details such as email addresses and phone numbers to build your lead list for marketing purposes.

The app you choose should let you brand the survey screen with a company logo for a more cohesive customer experience. But most importantly, you should be able to put the survey into “kiosk mode” so that you won’t need an employee nearby to manage it. The survey will be locked down, meaning the customer won’t be able to leave the screen to play Candy Crush or check Facebook.

Why kiosk surveys are growing in popularity

There are several advantages to using kiosk surveys instead of web based surveys.

Firstly, you won’t need an internet connection because the survey runs on an app, which means responses are stored on the device until you’d like to download the data to a web application for analysis. Sure, most retail businesses have reliable wifi, but for those times that you’d like to transport your survey to locations with a spotty internet connection — such as exhibitions, outdoor events or conferences — you’ll be happy you have that option.

Secondly, if you are a retail business that has several locations, understanding customer satisfaction as it pertains to each location is of utmost importance. Kiosk surveys allow you to analyze customer responses according to each store, while comparing the performance of each store’s employees and managers. When an issue is identified because of customer feedback, you know exactly where the issue occurred. Web based surveys can’t distinguish responses according to location.

Thirdly, capturing feedback in real-time means angry customers are able to vent at the store and are less likely to head home to blast your business on Yelp or TripAdvisor. It also means you eliminate bias in survey responses. With a receipt or email survey, a customer may be hanging out with their cute dog for several hours before completing your survey, adding a tinge of positivity to their responses. Getting a sense for in-the-moment customer feelings is also useful because they are highly correlated to impulse purchases.

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Overall, the reasons to ditch receipt and email surveys and adopt kiosk surveys are plentiful. Kiosk surveys offer a more visually pleasing experience for the customer, and survey incentives like coupons or free gifts can be prominently promoted on the main screen.

It’s time to say goodbye to ugly web survey forms, and hello to beautiful iPad surveys. Your customers will thank you for it.

3 COMMENTS

  1. Thanks for nice writeup Shereen. I think the key for surveys is to keep them short though it can be useful for there to be longer “not required” comment fields. Customers that take the time to enter comments are the most qualified respondents thanks to that input not being required. And all types for tablet enclosures and formats available today.

  2. Indeed Craig, keeping a customer feedback survey brief is incredibly important because it will significantly increase the response rate.

  3. Great piece about kiosks and research! When done right, kiosk surveys are an inexpensive, secure, and simple way to gain insight to customer behavior. While this article links to one particular survey app (nicely done!), you can also do this through existing surveys created through the more well known survey websites (surveymonkey, polldaddy, or google forms, for instance), with kiosk software to protect user data and device access. Here’s another article about the intersection between technology and research, and how it can best be accomplished.

    http://www.quirks.com/articles/2014/20140225-3.aspx

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