Fortunately, at Kiosk & Display, we’ve got your back. Digital merchandising for financial institutions is all we do. And it’s all we’ve been doing for ten years.

We’ll identify the best places in your branches to engage your customers/members.

We’ll spec the best equipment for your budget.

We’ll schedule and manage your playlists… by branch.

And, what really sets us apart from our competitors is that we can create agency-quality, custom and branded content for your products, services, community programs and your latest promotion… all at very affordable prices.

Our job is to make you look like a hero to your organization for bringing digital merchandising to life in your branches. Are you ready to get started? We are.

The survey, just out from Cisco, looked at the influence that in-store digital content has on consumer buying decisions, how shoppers engage in cross-channel shopping and how customers use technology while shopping.

In short, the survey found that digital content in-store at the point of sale triggered buying. For instance, 19% of respondents were influenced to make a purchase after receiving inspiration from a digital trigger. Of those surveyed, 51% currently use or will use an in-store kiosk to help in their decision process. Additionally, the report states that 40% will use or are interested in using a mobile phone for related in-store digital content and 35% will use tablets for the same purpose.

While kiosks, digital signage and other such technology have been around for awhile, there is now an explosion of in-store content that consumers utilize and combine in a shopping experience “mash-up”. Consumers are very comfortable “hopping” from one channel to another in order to find the best combination of information, price and other decision-making factors.

This comfort level will lead to an increased dependence in a digitally-based shopping experience. What consumer experience have you created in your branches? How do you get started? We can help you define your unique digital in-store engagement… if you call us.

Our client, Linda Douglas (VP/Marketing), wants you to know that digital signage is the perfect way to integrate branch merchandising with product and brand awareness in a tech-savvy way. “It’s easier for us to produce digital signage and push it out instantaneously than it is for us to print posters and have to distribute them to the branches”, she says.

Credit Union Management’s June 2011 magazine issue features the branch and more of Linda’s insight. Click here to read the article and see the digital branch.

Every piece of technology will eventually fail. It’s true. All technology needs attention and monitoring, the question is “who will do this for you?”

Sure, some digital signage “do it yourself kits” may be able to tell you which branch is offline with red and green dots, but that is not enough.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Trouble? Who will make sure a service ticket is opened before 9am each day? K&D will.
• Who will quickly troubleshoot the many parts of a digital signage network to find the root cause of the outage? K&D will.
• Who will maintain an accurate list of the hardware at each store with serial numbers, models and repair data? K&D will.
• Who will provide quarterly summaries of campaign and service tickets with costs? K&D will.
• Who will do this on holidays or when you are on vacation? K&D will.

Your digital merchandising provider has a duty to protect your brand. We take that charge very seriously at K&D.

The solution is easy, call your K&D content specialist today and request a “Proof of Play PDF”. These easy to print PDF files are an exact replica of the actual messages played at a specific branch, or all branches, depending on what your auditor requests.

The cost is reasonable, just pay your usual low hourly rate. All projects are estimated in advance.

Show that auditor that you are one step ahead and start with a monthly capture today!

Call 877-585-3387 to get started!

Last month we showed you the new K&D vertical engagement stations for Gwinnett Federal Credit Union (GFCU). Not all of GFCU’s needs were for traditional retail. Like many of you, they have small offices on campuses, or other off-site spaces where space is a premium, yet they still wanted branded digital content. The K&D solution was to place a wall-mounted display on the outside of the office facing the foot traffic. It’s quite the attention-getter. The branch manager reports many people are stopping in and saying that they never knew GFCU was in this space.

What are your unique space configurations? When you work with a digital signage provider that isn’t trying to sell you cookie-cutter programs, you get non-traditional solutions. Give K&D a call with your challenge. We’re up for it.

To see more installation solutions click HERE.

Still using a human greeter at your branch? Come on, go digital and save tons of money by incorporating Kiosk & Display’s greeting messages placed on strategically located screens in your lobby. A simple and inexpensive contact switch on your front door triggers custom messages designed to make guests feel welcome. The engineers at K&D have designed a flawless interface that instantly switches your on-going content to a greeting-oriented message and then returns back to your previously scheduled programming.

The best part? The digital greeter is never on break! Give us a call and we’ll tell you more about this must-have feature for your digital merchandising network.

We spend January first walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched.  Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives… not looking for flaws, but for potential.

May your 2012 be full of potential. We’re going all out for ours… and yours.

Happy New Year from the gang at Kiosk & Display.

At Kiosk & Display, we respectfully request 90 days notice of separation. That’s it. And that’s on your entire iPoster system, not a rolling agreement on every new screen and player.

Plus, we don’t make you pay for the entire year… unless of course you want to!  We invoice quarterly for easy budgeting.

And here’s the final difference in the way we handle your business: if you’re unhappy with your current digital signage partner, and you want to bring your business to K&D, we won’t charge you for monthly support until your current contract runs out. Think about that… you can have your cake and eat it too. Push out the old and bring in the new without doubling up your cost. No need to wait.

Just another way that Kiosk & Display makes it easy for people to get your message.

Makes sense, right? Why have staff travel to a central location during precious daytime selling hours for training when they can simply view live or taped training content right in their home branch? The K&D iPoster system can easily be scheduled to automatically switch from customer-facing messages to internal ones and employees can learn “on the job”.

Our client, Kennebunk Savings, will sometimes send a regional training specialist to the branch to augment the digital program. “We’re able to have more personal and more detailed discussions around specific training issues after viewing the content with our front line associates” says Jenny Straezt, Kennebunk Marketing Coordinator. “It clearly reduces time and cost associated with this important function”.

Training presentations can be controlled locally with a hand-held remote, or can be set to run automatically on a specific schedule. Whatever your preference for training might be, clearly you can get additional return on your digital signage investment when you use the K&D iPoster system so your staff can all get the message.

The VES allows members to calculate savings or borrowing scenarios specific to their exact financial situation. The interactive screen also provides the MSR on duty with selling opportunities by using it to recommend the best products suited for the members’ needs.

The triple-screen iPoster array makes quite a statement over the teller line and is designed to project outward into the store to grab the attention of harried shoppers. Custom systems were designed by K&D to allow Nutmeg to take advantage of the three-screen “real estate” and use copy specifically created for the horizontal array.

Client: Kennebunk Savings Bank
Message: Holiday Message
Retail Objective: Express warm wishes for the holiday season
K&D Solution: Animated winter scene featuring falling snowflakes
Result: Religious orientation-neutral seasonal message appropriate for all audiences

Recently K&D completed a fun and different project for Michigan First Credit Union. MFCU wanted to engage both members and potential members in an interactive way at their Social Engagement Stations in their Wayne State University branch located in the student union. (For a closer look at this great digital branch, see this previous blog post).

The K&D content development team created a fun game that features a maneuverable piggy bank that the user guides along pathways to gobble up coins, earning points along the way. Point totals are captured by member and the high score is visible to any player as the score to beat.

The game was named “Freebie” and was branded with the popular Young & Free social media program that MFCU is a participant in. Prizes include Subway sandwiches. Arcade-like music was added to the game for a realistic experience.

Presently only executed in the Wayne State branch, the game is being considered for a system-wide rollout as well as potentially a web-based application.

Games. A new aspect for digital signage content in the quest to deliver your message.

The past year has been good to us and we are grateful. We thank you for your patronage and for allowing us to be of service to you.

From all of us at K&D, a hearty Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Well, K&D client Watertown Savings Bank has it figured out. They merchandise their wildly successful Travel Club very frequently, often dedicating up to 25% of their community messages to this important differentiator. And it works on many levels.

“First of all, it de-clutters our lobbies and removes flyers, counter cards and home-made signs.” Carole Katz VP/Marketing for Watertown says. “And we replaced them with messages on screen that reflect our brand better. The photos that our club participants take are beautiful and make eye-catching slides.”

She goes on to say the photos act as conversation starters with customers in the lobbies. Many refer to the fact that they had once been to that locale, or ask when did the club go there, or where is the club going next… all great ways to engage in dialogue with the people in your branch.

More results? “Our travel options usually sell out.” Katz is quick to say. “So we can then put up reminder messages about “Reserving your Tickets” to other special occasions like our upcoming Annual Holiday Event.”

She adds, “Our screens are noticed and read. Overall, customers have responded positively to all of our messages. We keep them relevant and update them frequently.” Clearly this is a happy K&D client and a supporter of digital signage. Want to learn more about how people in your branches can get your messages via digital signage? Just ask us. Or take a Watertown Club trip. If you can get in.

Kiosk & Display sent staff to the Customer Engagement Technology World 2012 conference in NYC the week of November 7th to find new and inspiring technology to be used as building blocks for smart solutions for our clients. The show was filled with the latest technology and gadgets, but alas we didn’t uncover many specific solutions for specific customer applications. The old adage remains, until a customer has been interviewed and problems identified, technology alone is just a raw ingredient in the total digital merchandising program that still needs considerable customization and development to meet specific goals.

That said, there was still plenty to see and learn and your K&D team benefited from being around like-minded people in our industry. One memorable takeaway was a succinct definition of “customer engagement” as delivered by the general manger of the conference, Lawrence Dvorchik. He said: “customer engagement is turning a prospect on to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context”.

We attended many sessions but found that the most compelling speaker was B. Joseph Pine, co-founder of Strategic Horizons LLP. Some highlights from his presentation:

• Use your customers’ bodies, arms and legs, to engage them. Digital merchandising is more effective when responding to customer motions and gestures.
• Consider shifting marketing dollars from traditional advertising and instead create virtual marketing experiences.
• Bring your messages to customers’ smart phones because they are such a personal part of their life.

Here are some other trade show nuggets you might enjoy:

Gatorade cooler door suddenly communicates centrally managed marketing messages to customers.

Virtual greeter can bring an attention grabbing “hello” to your customers.

Turn any window into a customer engagement.

Nanolumens digital mesh is flexible, perfect to dress up large awkward columns in your branch.

K&D tweeted from the conference and if you would like to scroll down through our comments, you can visit our stream at: http://twitter.com/kioskanddisplay

Are you spending too much time managing the variety of screens you have in your branches?

How it all started:

The majority of Kiosk & Displays’ business back then was servicing Wachovia banking kiosks inside Harris Teeter grocery store branches across the southeast as well as helping a handful of other (then smaller) customers manage their growing fleets of kiosks. The Wachovia kiosks were highlighted by full motion video actors explaining various products combined with a branch locator that was super interactive and very fun to use. In those days, 20″ touch screens had big (huge) rear tubes, and weighed 110 pounds, computers ran Windows 95 and no kiosks were connected to the Internet because there wasn’t online banking at most banks yet. Just one year later, in 2002, most kiosks were connected to the Internet and the primary purpose of the kiosks was to teach a newly launched mysterious service called “online banking” to bank customers.

As K&D continued to develop the kiosk product, requests started popping up from customers who needed help managing marketing messages on their in-branch television screens. These requests led to the development of the iPoster system most of you know about today. Customers like Flagstar Bank began connecting multiple digital merchandising systems together inside each branch. Those systems included kiosks, flat screen marketing screens, old fashioned tube TV marketing screens, drive up teller screens, projector screens, and even some ATM screens. The concept of “Single Stream Screen Management” was born as the easiest way for customers to combine all of the screens in their branches to a single update path or channel, eliminating the need for the marketing department to call 5 vendors every time a rate changed or disclaimer needed to be updated.

Today:

Kiosk & Display services over 30 financial industry clients by developing custom digital merchandising content and the related technology platforms inside their branches. Thanks to all of you for letting us do what we love to do each day.

Looking forward:

We see technologies like big LED screens and large touch screens continuing to drop in price to become more and more affordable. This will make digital merchandising available to almost any small bank or credit union for the first time in history. Since technology will be the easy part, you can focus completely on developing a wonderful customer experience in your retail space by letting K&D develop great custom content for you. It is going to be a fun ride and we are just getting started. A big “thank you” to all of our clients who make all of this possible!

What a difference a decade makes:

In the photo gallery below you will see our first iPoster installation in 2002, a 60″ tube TV built into a huge expensive cabinet so the screen would appear “flat”. It was a real facilities feat. Today, branches can have 1,2 or 7 screens like the Michigan First Gen-Y branch below.

Sometimes you need more than the great digital merchandising content, scheduling and distribution hardware that we provide at K&D. You might need a special wall surround or graphic. Custom millwork or furniture. Branding. Or research. We’ve been a financial services provider for ten years and have developed great relationships with other companies in this category. Occasionally we’re going to tell you about one. Like now:

Retail, Corporate, Financial and most Brand/Consumer related companies have identified the need to stand apart from their competition to become the preferred choice in an ever more competitive marketplace. To be able to offer a true Branded Visual Communications Package which enhances the total “Customer Experience” platform in the most effective and cost-effective way. This is Millennium Signs & Display mantra.

Our technical expertise and dedication has brought us to the forefront of the Signage & Display Industry not only by way of design and fabrication but also through value engineering and technical support. Our assets are broad yet deep and we have built our reputation on quality, cost efficiency and timeliness.

Richard M. Seider
Sr. Account Executive – National Sales
Millennium Signs & Display, Inc.
90 West Graham Avenue
Hempstead, NY 11550
T: 516-292-8000 ext 115
F: 516-292-8832
M: 516-350-2125

But there’s another little secret out there that you have probably discovered if you went with a digital signage provider that promises easy-to-use templates that you can create with the infamous “drag and drop” design technique…. it’s still hard.

Not only is it time consuming, but here is the real down-side… your content is going to look very similar to your competitors down the street who are also using do-it-yourself content creation. Using templates homogenizes your brand. It undoes all your hard work that you put into differentiating your brand in your marketing. If your digital merchandising messages have a different look and feel than your other messages, then you have broken a golden rule of advertising… consistency.

But don’t despair. At K&D, our focus is on content creation. We understand that the branch is your most important medium and we strive to develop content that reflects your brand’s positioning and personality.

So if you have screens that are simply tuned to CNN, or your messages have that stretched-out Powerpoint feel, give us a call. We don’t care where you got your screens, but we do care that people in your branch get your message. And the boss will think you’re a genius.

Related to being creative, is being creative in a timely manner. We understand deadlines and turnaround times. We respect and honor them. We’re staffed to handle them.

Can we turn things around on a dime? If we have to, we can. We know that emergencies come up and if it’s important enough for one of our clients to ask for a quick turn, then we respect that request. Would we like to have a few days? Of course we would. We’ll provide better on-strategy solutions and more robust executions if we can spend time percolating ideas.

But one thing is for sure, new assignments don’t fall into a black hole at K&D. Our average turnaround time is 3-4 days… and always within a week.

Do your custom content requests receive that kind of attention at your current provider?

They should. If not, give us a try. We’ll make sure you get your messages. On time.

Let K&D simplify your life. We have a passion for what we call a “single stream for all screens”.

That’s right, we can manage them all and provide consistency and continuity for your content, no matter what size or shape your screens might be.

What types are we talking about? They run the gamut: drive-up; ATM; LED; remote teller; teller box; traditional television; mini’s on desks; and of course, your digital merchandising screens. We bet you might even have others.

So come on, challenge us. Stump us with your screen requirements. We’ve never met a screen we couldn’t connect.