Self-service kiosks are rapidly being deployed in sectors like retail, dining, and hospitality.

For example, restaurants that use kiosks see increased order sizes as well as more consistent ordering experiences when they deploy kiosks.

Factors such as labor shortages, preference for contactless transactions, and more dependable technology are all driving forces for increased adoption. Kiosk monitoring software enables operators to monitor kiosks in real-time for problems, running diagnostics and troubleshooting issues with endpoints at scale.

Recent research highlights how businesses with advanced kiosk monitoring software experience 47% fewer customer complaints and calls about kiosk malfunctions.

Furthermore, businesses saw a 17% reduction in incidents that require a technician to attend and fix a malfunctioning kiosk. Together, these improvements led to reduced kiosk downtime and smoother operations. 

But what exactly is kiosk monitoring software?

What Is Kiosk Monitoring Software?

Kiosk monitoring software can also be referred to as a kiosk management system. It is a broad category of software that helps technical teams support and maintain kiosks remotely. 

Kiosk Monitoring Software encompasses a wide range of product capabilities, some of which are combined into a single software platform. Let's break down the primary capabilities into two groups: monitoring and management.

1. Kiosk Monitoring:

Below are three core kiosk monitoring characteristics:

• Online/Offline Monitoring: Often termed "heartbeat monitoring," this basic feature provides updates on the kiosk's status at regular intervals. If a kiosk fails to report its status, a heartbeat checks in, and the software typically sends an alert about the potential offline issues. 

• Peripheral Monitoring: While many kiosks may be simple tablets running a browser, others have peripheral devices like printers, scanners, cameras, and payment devices. Observability on the status of these peripherals is crucial for ensuring the kiosk's consistent operation and can significantly minimize downtime. 

• Reporting and Analytics: This functionality offers historical insights on kiosk performance metrics, such as uptime and usage. Some Kiosk Monitoring Software will have customizable dashboards to present this data, and users can typically export these metrics to Excel for in-depth analysis.

👉 Learn more about remote monitoring for connected products like kiosks.

2. Kiosk Management:

Below are four central kiosk remote management characteristics:

• Configuration Management: This involves overseeing kiosk statuses based on various configuration settings, including software versions, operating system updates, and kiosk modes.

• Remote Access and Actions: This feature allows users to access the kiosk remotely as though they were physically present. For Windows kiosks, popular tools include Splashtop, TeamViewer, and LogMeIn, whereas Linux kiosks often rely on remote SSH tools. Some kiosk management platforms, such as Canopy, have built-in remote access and SSH capabilities. 

• Software Updates: The software can remotely deploy updates to the kiosk, whether it's for the main application or the operating system environment.

• Advanced Features: High-end kiosk management tools often incorporate features like self-healing automation, remote power cycles, automated reboot, smart notifications, and resets for peripheral devices. These functionalities enhance the kiosk's uptime by enabling remote and automatic restorations. This means fewer customer complaints and a reduced need for onsite technicians.

👉 Learn more about remote management for connected products like kiosks.

In simple terms, kiosk monitoring software (or kiosk management systems) are tools designed to support and maintain large fleets of unattended kiosks remotely. They monitor the kiosk's overall health, including any peripheral devices. Additionally, they provide remote management capabilities, such as remote access and software updates, resolving downtime issues when they are spotted.

How Can Kiosk Monitoring Minimize Downtime?‍

Self-service kiosks support all kinds of functions, from making it easy for customers to place orders, to supporting health, to paying bills, and even teaching CPR!

But the customer experience suffers when kiosks malfunction. This is no matter whether due to configuration drift, aging firmware, network issues like spotty wi-fi, incorrect settings or permissions, touchscreen problems, peripherals in need of resetting or rebooting, or bill acceptor problems and issues with credit card readers. When bad things happen with kiosks, the results can break the user experience on the device and result in lost sales, costly repairs, tarnished brands, and worse.

Additionally, because kiosks are intended to be unattended technology, working semi-autonomously, downtime can go unreported indefinitely.

We see downtime as being a function of adding:

1. The time taken to detect an issue
2. The duration the ticket waits in a support queue
3. The actual time required for effective resolution

Too often only the time in queue and resolution time are considered for downtime metrics. Though it is hard to measure, total downtime is what matters most.

For more regarding remote device downtime for kiosks and other connected products, see our free 2024 research into 200K support tickets across 100K remote devices:

3 Ways to Reduce Kiosk Problems

Below are three approaches to reducing kiosk problems.

Note that Canopy, a remote device management platform designed to adapt and automate control of thousands of kiosks, can help with each of these approaches.

1. Proactively Identify Issues 

With real-time kiosk monitoring, businesses can identify potential kiosk problems before they are escalated. The "heartbeat monitoring" feature provides real-time status updates on kiosk health. If a kiosk doesn't report its status, alerts are sent out, allowing technical support teams to take immediate action. Monitoring the status of peripherals, software services, and hardware metrics such as CPU and memory usage provides technical teams with insights into potential issues or early signs of failure. Early detection will identify potential issues faster, reducing a key driver of downtime. This proactive approach also allows you to address problems before a customer encounters a negative experience. 

2. Remotely Resolves Issues 

Enhancing remote resolution capabilities is a significant advantage of kiosk management software and another component to reducing kiosk downtime. In the past, resolving a malfunction would frequently require sending a technician or employee onsite, a time-consuming and costly process. 

But with kiosk monitoring software, support technicians can frequently resolve issues from a remote location and remove the need to have someone physically touch the kiosk or wait for a technician to get on-site to fix the kiosk. Enhanced remote resolution tools, including remote access, not only lead to immediate problem-solving but also help reduce the amount of time an issue sits in the support queue, further minimizing downtime.

3. Automate Self-Healing 

One of the standout features of advanced kiosk management software, like Canopy, is the ability to automate self-healing. 

If the system detects a malfunction, it can attempt to rectify the problem on its own. This could mean resetting a peripheral device, rebooting a PC, or restarting a particular software service. The magic of this approach is in taking action without expensive labor from technical support. This reduces the average time to resolution through immediate action and gives technical support time back in their day to focus on critical operations vs. routine resolution workflows.

Businesses that heavily leverage automation have seen 1,000s of hours saved by their support team each month. For example, OpenTech Alliance was able to cut time spent onboarding new kiosks by 50%:

Read more about how OpenTech automates remote device management.

Conclusion 

As connected products like self-service kiosks (and other self-service technology), digital signage, smart lockers and more become more prevalent, so does the need for remote monitoring and management software.

With the evolution of kiosk monitoring software and kiosk management systems, businesses are better equipped to handle issues proactively, resolve problems remotely, and automate solutions to a wide range of common malfunctions. 

You can monitor kiosks using remote monitoring and management software designed for connected products like Canopy. Canopy is used to monitor all kinds of kiosk devices, helping technical support teams globally minimize downtime across thousands of devices, provide end customers with the customer experience they expect.

Learn more about using Canopy remote device management to monitor kiosks.

Now, go forth and minimize kiosk downtime!

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Originally published October 11, 2023. Updated October 2024.