As technology continues to permeate many aspects of people’s lives, touchscreens are becomingly an increasingly familiar interface for guests to make use of throughout their stay. Touch technology provides a fast and intuitive interface for all users and simplifies guest interactions. Users don’t have to know how to use a computer. They just touch the capacitive display to make selections. No keyboard is required, saving valuable space.
There are older touchscreen and kiosk technologies that have been transformed to become guest facing, where the user interface requirements are altogether different. These offerings are little more than a repackaging of older commercial solutions, some with a few inherent problems. Because flexibility is important in guest-facing solutions, the use of consistent UI technology is essential to create a streamlined and accurate user experience. Security measures are different as well. Even basics such as location and access to power have different challenges, often more complicated, with older technologies that have been transformed to become guest facing.
Fortunately, new and exciting touchscreen technologies are being designed every day. They are the future. It’s inevitable that we all will someday enter a business – any business- and be more surprised when greeted by a person rather than an interactive kiosk.
In hospitality applications, new touchscreen technology is re-imagining the guest experience. Whether kiosks or tablets, the latest tech serves guests directly with capacitive touch. Order data is transmitted to back of the house and kitchen, where again touch technology is used to manage, prepare and dispatch orders, rather than using kitchen printers and manual paper chits.
What Makes New Touch Technology Irresistible?
- It’s the experience people have with it. Guests find the product straightforward to use and operators find the product easy to deploy, configure and launch. The touchscreen kiosk empowers guests to order and pay wherever they are, regardless how well that area is staffed.
- There’s tremendous flexibility built-in. Whether it’s a kiosk deployed for grab and go environments, buffet solutions, complex café and food court style environments, or if it’s a mobile POS tablet used to augment server workflows and increase coverage areas, it’s fits quite naturally into these situations.
- New kiosk technology is easy to configure, deploy, and manage at scale. It incorporates a flexible hierarchical business mapping capability that permits centralized menu creation and even pushes that information to remote locations. There’s a whole lot of technology under the hood, hidden from view, that makes the magic possible.
- New PMSs touch technology, namely PMSs (property management systems), include remote access monitoring and reporting capabilities via touch, which makes life much easier for busy managers.
Need more information?
See how Agilysys rGuest® Buy delivers a 7:1 return on investment in its first year, with users seeing 60% reductions in operational costs, increasing guest throughput as much as 3x, and discovering new revenue opportunities from locations that previously had high demand with limited service availability.