Ask the following 10 questions to know if your proposed solution is the right one for today and tomorrow:

• You are a Customer Service Representative and a customer using a Self-Service kiosk has called you. According to the
  customer, she inserted a 20-dollar bill in the kiosk and her balance owing was 50 dollars before she paid 20 dollars. However, her account shows that she has 40 dollars outstanding. Can your remote monitoring software give you the facts fast while she waits?

• You are a marketing manager at Wonderful Wireless. Your
  company recently installed 10 bill payment kiosks at various locations. The kiosks offer two services, Bill Pay and Prepaid wireless. Wonderful is thinking of deploying 1000 more kiosks.
  Does your kiosk management software present the data of the trial implementation to you easily and fast?

• You work for a bank and are in charge of reconciling the cash in the kiosks with your daily ACH. You accidentally spilled coffee on the cash receipts that came in the cash bag. You know that the cash bag carries receipts from locations 1-5. Can your kiosk management application help you reprint the receipts?

• You are a customer service representative and a customer just called saying that her bill is jammed in the cash acceptor. Can you confirm this immediately?

• You want to start a customer loyalty program for your kiosk users. Can your software search for eligible customers. If you want to reward a 2 dollar discount to all customers who have used a kiosk to pay or paid on time for the last 6 months, can your software generate the data and can your software vendor help you automatically credit those customers?

• You want to monitor money laundering and investigate transactions over 1000 dollars. Does the software have the capability to generate reports (in real time would be a big plus) that you can use to alert you to potential money laundering cases?

• You want to build the right inventory for replenishing printing paper. Can your application help you decide how often should you replace printer paper or alert you in real-time when paper is low?

• Over the last few months, you want to track what kiosk availability was like and get a breakdown for the reasons behind downtime. How long will it take you to obtain the data and what is the level of analysis? Is data detailed? Does your report clarify whether it was device failure or a paper jam that caused the downtime? Can the application tell you the exact point of failure?

• In a bid to increase customers you partnered with another business and gave special incentives to new end customers. You want to monitor the profitability from the promotion. A possible metric could be the level of chargebacks. Can your application help you with this information? How long would it take to extract this level of analysis?

• You can imagine scenarios in the future where you may want to add services and change backend processes. Change is constant anyway. Can your software vendor work with you to adapt the solution to your reporting needs in a minimum time frame?

Rule 7
Plan for Maintenance Woes.