With the recent booms in the retail, healthcare, entertainment, and travel industries, it’s getting increasingly difficult for businesses to provide enough salespeople and customer service agents to meet their clients’ needs. Interactive Kiosks were invented to solve this problem by offering a means of helping customers get information about various products and services without face to face assistance.
The first interactive kiosks to be integrated into the customer service industry on a mass scale were introduced in airports, allowing travellers to check in to their flights without waiting in dreadfully long lines for an attendant. Thanks to huge technological advancements in the past few years however, these kiosks have become much more user friendly and are able to handle complex tasks in just seconds!
As such, this market currently nets at a whopping US$2.40 billion and that number is expected to almost double by 2016 at a CAGR of 14.81 percent thanks to the growth opportunity in the Europe and APAC regions. Up until now, the Global Interactive Kiosks market has been dominated by North America which accounted for a 68 percent share (or 1.28 million units) in 2012. This market is quickly becoming saturated however, which will no doubt lead to an increase in the shares of the overseas nations who are presently in relatively nascent stages of development.
Although it is one of the global leaders in technology, Europe only accounted for a 16 percent revenue share in the Global Interactive Kiosks market in 2012. This low number is mainly because of the economic slowdown of 2008-2009 and the Euro crisis of 2010. Although the country is witnessing sluggish growth, the market is expected to accelerate in 2013 and onward as retailers look to adopt new IT initiatives to upgrade themselves technologically.
Meanwhile the APAC region, currently sitting with a market share of just 14 percent is set to expand even faster during the next four years thanks to rapid economic growth and explosions in the entertainment, healthcare, and retail industries in the region. South Korea, Australia, and Japan are expected to make the largest impacts.
At the end of the day, it’s clear that we are witnessing a worldwide revolution in the future of customer service. Although the Global Interactive kiosks market is currently facing some serious challenges in terms of customer acceptance, there is no denying the utility of a functional—and even more efficient—substitute to in-person service agents.
While there will always be some end-users who are averse to big technological changes, we have no doubt that once consumers realize the capacity of interactive kiosks to eliminate waiting in lines forever, this technology will be accepted on a mass scale across the world, pushing the global market to even higher revenue.
…And judging from the facts above, we’re already half-way there!
For more information, view our 2012-2016 Global Interactive Kiosks Report.
