Packaging and Promotion - Foot Traffic

Bill Payment Kiosks Draw Customers to Retail Outlets

"We know our customers are showing an increasing desire to walk into the center and pay bills," says Mike Stanfill, director of retail operations for Sprint PCS (www.sprintpcs.com), which recently began introducing into its retail stores kiosks developed by NCR Corp. (www.ncr.com). "We want to make it a real value to get into and out of the stores."

The values Stanfill sees are time savings for both customers and Sprint PCS sales reps, as well as the opportunity for the sales reps to spend more quality time working with customers to select new phones or calling plans rather than processing payments.

Without self-service bill payment kiosks, salespeople "don't have as much time to sell because [taking payments] sucks up all of their time," says Mike Halpern, managing partner of professional services for kiosk solutions at NCR. "This is really no different than the model that banks use for ATMs. They get that customer out of line and are able to upsell customers that are in the line."

Halpern notes that the payback for the kiosk is likely to be quick, when calculating the time savings for the retail store's sales team and the potential addition of revenue gained by selling more products and value-added services.

"Given how quickly these machines pay for themselves, they're going to be a competitive requirement" for the telecom retail services industry, says Halpern.

The project with Sprint PCS is NCR's first for bill payment in the telecom industry. "This is the first real serious 'transaction of value' kiosk done for the telco industry," Halpern says, noting that they've done kiosks to provide content such as human resources information for employees or other services offering details for prospective customers.

Sprint PCS isn't the only telecom provider for which NCR is developing payment kiosks. In mid-December 2000, Cingular Wireless (www.cingular.com), a joint venture between BellSouth Cellular and SBC Communications Inc. (www.sbc.com), became the second wireless company to put NCR kiosks in their retail locations. The bill payment web kiosks are now in 186 retail locations throughout the southeastern United States Valued at $2.5 million, the deal with Cingular includes the NCR 7401 Web Kiosk and receipt printer.

However, this is not NCR's first foray into kiosk bill payment solutions. "NCR can handle it," says Francie Mendelsohn, president of Summit Research Associates Inc. (www.summit-res.com), a consulting firm specializing in the kiosk industry. "NCR has had units that can read checks for years, so for them this is not much of a stretch."

In fact, for NCR, it was a fairly quick turnaround from the time Sprint PCS approached them about the kiosk until the units started appearing in stores. Stanfill says that NCR provided a prototype within 90 days, and within eight months, Sprint PCS was beginning to put the machines in the bulk of its 300 stores nationwide.

But with an Internet bill payment option, which Sprint PCS has been offering for quite a while, might the kiosk plan be a bad investment--a system that could eventually become obsolete?

"So far, the Internet has had a minimal impact," says Mendelsohn.

Halpern agrees. "Over the years, we've discovered that there's a huge amount of people who don't have a banking or Internet relationship," he says. "I'm amazed at how many people pay over the counter. It's an issue of how they manage their finances, whether paying by cash or check."

Kiosk users tend to be "the people who don't have credit or the little old ladies who spend time at the malls," says Halpern. Those who use Internet payment and those who use kiosks "are absolutely two different customers," he adds.

NCR's kiosks can be customized as customers require. For instance, the NCR kiosk allows Sprint PCS to accept cash, credit cards, debit cards, checks and money orders.

The kiosk can also tie directly into the company's back-end web payment engine, or the Oracle financial database, using very detailed application interfaces for the latter. Halpern says the kiosk can also become part of a company's point-of-sale (POS) system. "There's no function that these can't do that the clerk at the counter can do," he says.

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