Health & Nutrition Information Kiosks
The information-providing kiosk set gets plenty of knocks from its big brothers, those muscular transaction-based self-service machines that deliver powerful ROI statistics. Healthnotes, Inc. is proving that it’s not always about the numbers.
Information, Please
By Rick Redding
The information-providing kiosk set gets plenty of knocks from its big brothers, those muscular transaction-based self-service machines that deliver powerful ROI statistics. Healthnotes, Inc. is proving that it’s not always about the numbers.
More than 6,000 kiosks that do nothing but provide information have been installed at a variety of supermarket, health food, vitamin and medical locations. This story of soft ROI, now eight years old, is one of amazing success. Its sales pitch is that the company believes the kiosks lead to more sales. It believes that the kiosks allow staff to focus on other tasks, that the burden of providing product education for staff is lessened. Most kiosks get used by 20-30 customers per day, people seeking trusted information on pharmaceutical products, food, and lifestyle choices. The problem is there aren’t many numbers to prove it.
HNI is working on the numbers, though. The company claims a yet-unpublished study shows that 40 percent of Healthnotes kiosk users made a purchase based on the information obtained at the kiosk.
Maybe, though, numbers aren't a problem for the Oregon company, which this week unveiled a new version of its star product. The EasyAnswers Touchscreen Kiosk, the Low Profile, is available in nine steel enclosures with varying graphics. The kiosk provider is KIOSK InformationSystems. Healthnotes has kiosks in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
The Low-Profile Kiosk is a plug-and-play unit preconfigured to run Healthnotes applications. Standing five-feet tall, it’s available in red, green or blue. It includes engaging graphics to grab customers’ attention and motivate them to use the kiosk to find answers to their health, food, and lifestyle questions. Graphics are customized for Healthy Living, Food and Recipes, or Pharmacy.
“Over the past eight years of helping retailers deploy information kiosks in-store, we’ve found that one of the key challenges they face is designing a kiosk that’s engaging and easy-to-use for their customers,” said Dr. Skye Lininger, Healthnotes president and CEO. “With our new Low-Profile Kiosks, HNI has leveraged our years of design expertise to address these challenges and are proud to offer an easy, affordable way for retailers to tailor a kiosk to their stores.”
The power of information is the driving force behind the brand. In a speech being delivered this week to the Natural Products Expo East in Washington, D.C., Lininger will focus his remarks on the power of information in retail. By providing customers with information on complex topics, Lininger believes retailers using Healthnotes devices have an advantage in the competitive marketplace.
“There will never be fewer people expecting ‘information at their fingertips’ – in store and offline – than there are today,” he says.
Lininger advises retailers to seek out reliable, credible information for stores. And he says that information should be presented in a way that drives sales. He said 35-40 percent of customers in a recent study made a purchase decision based on information from a kiosk.
That’s the kind of statistic that has motivated seven of the top 10 supermarket chains in install Healthnotes kiosks. The information that Healthnotes provides is generally more complex than store employees can know or provide. Content is written for Healthnotes by a team of medical doctors, pharmacists, naturopathic physicians, chiropractors, and dieticians.
And Lininger maintains that customers are willing and able to use touchscreen kiosks to obtain this complex information during their shopping experience.
Finally, Lininger drives home the point that the time for content kiosks is the present.
“Two big ‘waves’ are hitting the shore at the same time in our history,” he says in his Natural Products Expo speech. “The Internet is only ten years old, the Boomers are reaching age 50 at the rate of 4.2 million per year. These two trends are the future dirvers for all businesses.”
This case study was generated by Kioskcom
