I was recently ordering lunch from a take-away restaurant using a touch screen self-service kiosk. I selected my meal, reviewed the basket and clicked on the “Pay Now” button; I was ready to pay when a restaurant employee swooped in and said, “You need to click on the OK button.” They promptly clicked on a small window which said “OK” in the middle of the blank screen.
I was so attuned to the large font and the glossy picture menus that I hadn’t even noticed that the screen had gone blank apart from the “OK” button. It would therefore have taken me some time to even see the “OK” button, let alone click on it. I then noticed that the employee was moving from kiosk to kiosk clicking on the OK button for each customer and I now realise that this was likely to be the case across the country, possibly even across countries globally.
I am sure that this was likely classified as a high severity incident with a significant business impact, and a fix quickly rolled out to save the instore employees having to deploy the “you need to click on the “OK” button” fix. However, that is a lot of additional time and effort to keep the customer queues moving in an already busy restaurant. Also, the issue resulted in a poor customer experience. Whilst self-service kiosk adoption doesn’t appear to be an issue these days, some people were still refusing to use the kiosks and insisting on talking to someone and ordering face to face. This is very likely not the first time this has happened, and other restaurants and retail outlets alike will have suffered the same kind of simple but highly impactful issues.
Managing the business risks of introducing kiosks in restaurants and retail outlets
The benefits to be gained from introducing kiosks in restaurants and retail outlets are compelling and their continued expansion of use in retail seems inevitable, but it is important to recognise the additional risks to businesses. The kiosk style self-service point of sale systems are exposing more IT systems to their customers. The restaurant example above is an issue with a key customer interaction, where historically the restaurant employee could have completed a simple workaround without the customer ever even noticing. The defect might have been classed a medium priority, the workaround easily managed and eventually fixed with zero impact to the customer.
How phygital test automation can help
In the digital world, Quality Engineering, along with development and test processes, are well established. They have driven a revolution in the way we deliver IT systems, with customer experience, testing and quality being at the heart of the iterative and agile process. Test automation is fully embedded in the delivery process to ensure the fastest delivery of change while reducing risk.
Interest in the term phygital has gradually increased over the last couple of years. Phygital describe the melding of physical devices and digital IT systems in seamless business processes. Self-service point of sale kiosks are a classic example of a phygital system, while another example of phygital is the touchscreen “in-car entertainment” systems now available in most modern cars. Phygital test automation takes a holistic approach to test automation and recognises the need to include the physical and the digital elements within a single test process.
The digital test team hasn’t yet taken responsibility for the full phygital test automation strategy and the traditional model office environment, with it often being managed and tested by a different team.
Final thoughts
It is important to consider phygital automation within the Quality Engineering process in the retail environment and a unified test automation approach should be placed at the heart of the broad roll-out and adoption of self-service point of sale kiosks.
Consideration also needs to be given to the implementation and integration into existing automation processes. Security testing, data migration and legacy automation versus new automation challenges and the upskilling of existing test automation teams all need to be addressed to ensure greater success with phygital automation.
Meet the author: Mark Tristram
Mark Tristram is an Associate Vice President at Qualitest with more than 20 years of experience in IT project delivery, predominately working in large transformation programmes as a Test Manager.
He manages test teams based onshore and offshore, involving business end user, internal test resource and third-party test providers and assurance of testing completed by service integrators. He is also responsible for test planning, preparation, test execution, reporting and completion and works across a range of test types including unit test, system test, user acceptance test and non-functional/IT operational acceptance testing.
