Self-service kiosks are now an essential part of the tech fabric for tens of thousands of businesses. From grocery stores to fast-food restaurants, ticketing concessions to hotel lobbies, kiosks help to cut wait times, ease the load on staff and improve the customer experience, especially in terms of empowering people to do their own thing in their own time.

But you don’t earn these benefits simply by rolling out a few kiosk units and forgetting all about them. Kiosks won’t do anything to boost customer satisfaction and improve efficiency if they are not kept in prime working order. In fact, glitchy tech does the exact opposite. It holds people up and causes frustration.

That’s why, at RTG, we don’t just sell and install kiosks. We take a lot of pride in our aftercare and maintenance services, too. Kiosks have to endure a lot of heavy use over long periods of time. If you don’t look after them, their performance and their benefits quickly start to wane.

So what do you need to know about maintaining kiosks in optimum condition? Here are the essential steps.

Routine Preventative Maintenance

Preventative maintenance means taking a proactive approach to regularly inspecting, cleaning, and repairing kiosk hardware, as well as updating software. This contrasts with reactive maintenance, where you wait for something to go wrong before you take action. But by that point, you’re already a unit down and it’s harming how your business operates.

Regular inspections and service checks will identify potential issues such as worn out and damaged parts before they start to impact performance, and fix them before they do. Deep cleaning ensures dust and debris doesn’t build up to a point where they cause a problem, while sensors and screens can be tested and recalibrated as necessary. The same applies to checking network settings, connectivity etc. If the kiosk has a printer, consumables such as paper and ink ribbon can be replaced.

Software updates are essential to fix bugs, enhance security, and improve kiosk functionality. This includes ensuring that kiosks have access to the latest firmware to minimize vulnerabilities and improve the overall user experience.

Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance takes the idea of preventative maintenance a step further. Again, it’s about identifying and resolving issues before they impact performance. But it uses performance data from the machine to identify issues, rather than in-person inspections. This also means that the monitoring can be carried out remotely.

The latest predictive maintenance monitoring systems incorporate AI to automate analysis and raise alerts when necessary. They can risk assess which performance anomalies need immediate attention, and which are unlikely to cause immediate issues but should continue to be monitored. They also incorporate remote diagnostics and troubleshooting tools, helping operators fix common faults themselves without having to call out an engineer.

Predictive maintenance is a great complement to scheduled in-person inspections. With the right monitoring system in place, you need less regular scheduled engineer visits, with the backstop of knowing the system will flag up any faults that need attention in the meantime. Real-time performance monitoring combined with historical maintenance logs also helps to predict when parts will need servicing and when, helping to make service visits more efficient, and allowing kiosk operators to perform repairs strategically with minimum downtime.

Strategic Choice of Maintenance Partner

Finally, arguably the biggest step to acing your kiosk maintenance strategy is choosing the right partner. At RTG, we mix scheduled in-person servicing with the latest predictive monitoring to provide agile performance protection from all angles. But we also offer a lot more besides. We use the very best highly trained technicians, and we also work closely with our OEM partner AURES to ensure engineers are fully trained in the specifics of every kiosk model we sell, and are kept up to date on new technologies, too.

In addition, we employ a first-time fix strategy, where our technicians carry common parts and modules for every kiosk on their vehicles, enabling them to resolve issues on the first visit, which significantly reduces service delays. We utilize a network of strategic stocking locations around the country for all other parts, reducing the time it takes to get components to operator locations. And through our service portal, operators can track maintenance requests, look up diagnostic data, and schedule repairs proactively.

We also have a 24/7 support center staffed by technically trained agents ready and waiting to take your call in person, any time, so you can always be sure of getting the help you need, when you need it.