Considerations When It Comes to Bill Payment Kiosk

And how these payments are made are important to note. As much as Check21 did to simply checks, that is still a major form of payment depending on the venue. You have cash payment terminals running $5000 a day in some locations. And then there is a credit card and mobile.

There are specific geographic and demographic data outlining these groups. Ethnic and cultural factors play into it with some cultures preferring cash.

That’s where a bill pay kiosk comes into play.

The benefits of adding a bill pay kiosk to an organization’s payment options are many. For the customer, those include few service disruptions, improved credit and fewer reconnect and/or late payment fees. The kiosks in a way become the financial center or “bank” for the underserved, which they know the bank has ignored them. For the organization, they include more timely payments, fewer trips by a technician to reconnect service that was cut off, lower staffing needs at the payment center, fewer trips to payday loan, check cashing centers where they used to go before the kiosk, and overall much improved customer satisfaction. That translates to higher retention of existing customers and a higher acquisition rate of new customers.

Still, accepting payments by kiosk isn’t just a matter of setting up a device in the headquarters lobby and hoping for the best. Here are a few considerations to take into account when deploying a bill pay kiosk.

By a large margin, those people who don’t use the Internet are 65 or older. Some of the main reasons, they say, are that it’s too difficult and they believe they’re too old to learn. If the kiosk application is too difficult to use it’ll be the same reason they give for avoiding it.

Incorporate large fonts and a logical payment process for the interface to make the kiosk easy on the eyes and the brain. Incorporate a simple way to start the process over if the user makes a mistake. It won’t hurt to have a staff member nearby during the first few weeks after initial rollout to assist first-time users. Kiosk technology also makes it easy to incorporate a variety of languages; make sure you include those options, especially if the unit will be located in a culturally diverse area. Users will appreciate it.

Include marketing materials about the new bill pay kiosks with bills, in print ads, on TV commercials, and on your website. Also have office staff inform customers who come in to pay their bills about the devices, and offer to guide them through the payment process.

One of the beauties of kiosk technology is that it allows organizations to expand their footprint without the capital costs of a brick-and-mortar location. In addition, we now live in a world where people expect to be able to conduct business at any hour of the day.

One way to increase the value of bill pay kiosks is to place them in areas where customers can access them at any time of the day or night, in a place that’s convenient for them. Along with placing a kiosk in the lobby of the central office, consider placing units in grocery stores or other 24-hour locations. This would be especially important when a significant number of customers live in rural locations.

Making sure that the right biller is available in the right geographic area is important. Utilities get the biggest use, and they’re the “magnet” effect if you are pulling the customers into paying their utility bills. Once the customer is there, they can see an array of options for paying their cable, wireless phone, and stored value cards like VISA & MC prepaid cards

That’s 90.6 million financially marginalized people who are further penalized, in terms of time and money, by having to rely on alternate financial services (AFS), which charge fees for transactions that are often free to customers of banks, credit unions and other federally insured institutions. Despite the financial recovery since the Great Recession and the growth of online financial services, the number of households with little or no access to bank accounts has remained stubbornly steady since 2009, when the FDIC began collecting statistics on the phenomenon.

Theresa Schmall, a manager at CFSI, points out that “solutions using digital and mobile platforms can provide expanded access” for the unbanked. It may also remove the presumption of exclusivity that prevents many unbanked and underbanked households from approaching mainstream financial services — while also eliminating those seemingly endless lines.