Examining Kiosk Surveys and When to Use Them

Whether it’s customers leaving your store or restaurant, or those using public services such as hospitals, trains, buses, leisure services and more. When it comes to engaging these individuals and collecting their feedback with a survey, timing is everything.

While there are plenty of ways to distribute your survey, from web embeds, emails and SMS to name a few, there are times when a more prominent method is required to gain the attention and feedback of your audience. This is where the use of the kiosk survey method can prove really effective.

What is a kiosk survey?

A kiosk survey is a survey that is administered via a freestanding touchscreen display device, or a tablet with survey software loaded onto it and the kiosk mode enabled. It can typically be found in retail, healthcare and other high traffic applications within point-of-sale or exit areas, to get user feedback on their buying or service experiences.

The electronic displays featuring these surveys are programmed to collect feedback and then automatically reset for the next person, once the previous user’s survey has been successfully submitted.

For example, let’s say you owned a restaurant chain and decided to place a kiosk survey in one of your restaurants to measure ongoing customer satisfaction. Your customer notices it on their way out and the screen’s message highlighting that they have the chance to win their next meal at the restaurant for free if they complete a quick survey.

You could then ask them to complete a short survey, to get their views about the service they’ve just experienced, using some simple questions such as the following, which asks them to select their answer based on a 1 to 5 rating scale.

• How would you rate your overall experience today?
• Did you receive a fast and friendly service?
• How was the quality of your food and drinks?
• Would you recommend our restaurant to a friend?
• How likely are you to come back again?

The customer completes these questions, hits submit, and then the kiosk simply resets for the next person. It’s a process which can quickly generate a significant amount of information over a short space of time.

Some key applications where you could find kiosk surveys

Given their ability to quickly gather a lot of information from a high volume of people, typical places where you might find a kiosk survey include.

Retail stores

Irrespective of what’s being sold, the very survival of a retail store relies on it delivering a consistently good purchasing and service experience. Subsequently, a kiosk survey focusing in on these areas can quickly give you a really strong snapshot of how you are performing.

Restaurants and cafes

The service experience is also vital to restaurants and cafes, both those at the high end and those running a high turnover take away service.

Kiosk surveys can help owners to quickly get a feel for how customers rate their overall service and the quality of the food and drink that they supply.

High traffic public amenities

From shopping centres, parks and libraries to bus and railway stations. High traffic public amenities such as this typically rely on the feedback of users to help maintain levels of cleanliness and the quality of their services. Subsequently, kiosk surveys are ideal for quickly gathering the views of large numbers of people and improving services for future users.

Healthcare facilities

Whether private or public, healthcare facilities ranging from hospitals, clinics and GP surgeries to dentists and opticians all have to deal with many patients on a daily basis, making service quality paramount.

By positioning kiosk surveys in prominent places such as reception areas, you can pick up a lot of critical information about how you’re performing and make the improvements you need.

Temporary or popup applications

Given the versatility of the kiosk survey method, they also lend themselves well to many additional environments including temporary or popup applications.

Consider a brand-new music festival or popup ice skating rink running at a new location for the very first time. To find out how much people are enjoying it and whether there will be strong enough demand to run it again at the same location, feedback from existing customers is paramount – making the kiosk survey a convenient way of quickly gathering this information.

Benefits of using kiosk surveys

Having explained what a kiosk survey is and outlined some of the key places where using it can be beneficial, you should have a better idea of how it might help you.

However, there are some more general benefits to be gained from using kiosk surveys, that can help you decide whether it’s right for you.

We’ve outlined some of the most important of these below.

No pressure on respondents

Generally speaking, most people don’t like to be pressured into taking a survey, and an interviewer rushing up to them with tablet or paper survey can quickly turn them off. However, a standalone kiosk survey is a passive experience, which they can choose to complete or walk away.

It’s more cost-effective

If you were to hire an interviewer to carry out a survey and collect responses in-store the costs could quickly escalate, especially if you were intending to run surveys frequently.

In contrast, while a kiosk survey may require an initial small investment, whether that’s through purchasing a freestanding kiosk survey unit, or tablets and survey software with the kiosk mode on it, in time it will quickly pay for itself through feedback collection.

Feedback quality improves

If you delay your survey and decide to collect people’s feedback with an email or phone survey, there’s a good chance that their recollection of their experiences won’t be so good. This may also affect the accuracy of their answers.

In contrast, with a kiosk survey, you’ll be able to collect feedback while it’s still fresh in your customers minds, which should help improve the quality of the feedback you get back.

High volume of responses

When it comes to response volumes, kiosk surveys can perform better than many other survey types.

For example, while it’s easy to delete an email survey or hang up after a customer service call without taking a phone survey, kiosk surveys can be taken while an individual is waiting for their order or waiting for a friend or family member.

Simple to implement

Kiosk surveys are relatively easy to implement. If you go for a free-standing kiosk unit, most of these are simple to set up, without the need to hardwire equipment and require little ongoing maintenance. Similarly, if your survey software has a kiosk survey mode, this should be easy to activate too.

Tips for kiosk survey questions

If you’re impressed with what you’ve heard and are now keen to crack on with your first kiosk survey, it can be helpful to think about how you will craft your questions to obtain the best results.

Here’s some tips for you to be thinking about.

Short is best

People can quickly become disengaged when surveys go on too long. So, try to keep your survey as short as possible, especially if it’s a stand-up kiosk.

Try to keep your survey to no more than five questions, so that it shouldn’t take more than a minute or two to complete. Think about a providing a good visual layout too, with no more than one question on the screen at a time, with a progress bar, so people know how much more they need to complete.

Keep things simple

If you ask people to type out their answers, it could result in some dropping out. So, think about using a rating scale or dichotomous style yes/no questions instead.

If you wanted to get an insight into why people answered in the way that they did, you might also choose to include an open-ended question to invite additional comment from them. However, to reduce the potential for people abandoning your survey, you should only include this at the end and make it optional.

Illustrate your survey with pictures

Pictures can really improve the look and appeal of your surveys and help reduce language barriers.

Depending on your type of business, a survey kiosk with pictures can be a great way of engaging users. You might also consider using emojis with your kiosk survey, to further strengthen how easy it is for participants to understand and complete.

Final thoughts

We hope you found this piece useful, and if you weren’t already familiar with kiosk surveys, that you now feel better informed about them and where they could benefit you.

Certainly, if the service you provide is the most important aspect of your business and you rely on a constant stream of customer traffic to keep it going, then collecting ongoing feedback from them is critical. And there is no better or a more convenient way of doing this than with a kiosk survey.