Retail kiosks and MDM

Retail hasn’t always been the quickest to cash in on technological improvements, but mobility has inevitably transformed the industry for the better. In recent years, the percentage of the retail sales have drastically increased with the growing number of online portals and mobile payment mechanisms. iPads and tablets help connect and engage customers through creative marketing campaigns, contests, ads, and promotions. Legacy hardware and custom applications are no longer necessary for POS kiosks. A dedicated app running on an iPad can make an excellent kiosk for use in retail business and an MDM solution can help businesses control these devices efficiently. Together, retail kiosks and MDM can create compelling customer experiences with enhanced interactions and customer engagement.

Benefits of mobile kiosks

A mobile kiosk offers numerous benefits:

1. Enhanced Customer service

Customer service is the key to successful business. A recent survey proves that 86% of consumers will purchase goods with those who provide better customer experience. Most of the retailers believe that when they concentrate on the satisfaction and well-being of their consumers, then it will reflect in their profit.

2. Product displays

Many retailers do not have ample amount of space for displaying large volumes of goods, in that case, tablets help vendors in displaying their full range of products, and make the transaction in the store, so the customer will not look for the similar product elsewhere.

3. Employee Productivity

Portable devices like tablets/iPad can increase workers’ productivity. It offers flexibility for employees to work at home, during commuting, business trips, and client visits. Employees can do their tasks on a PC or Mac and later store it on a tablet so that it can be shared with the other employees remotely through cloud storage services like Dropbox, iCloud or SharePoint.

Tablet/iPad Retail Kiosks with MDM

Mobile Device Management (MDM) ensures the security of information and helps in managing the policies across mobile devices. Also, implementing a cloud infrastructure reduces the costs and frees up retailers to build a creative campaign and keep customers satisfied.

MDM is a platform lifecycle management technology that allows retailers to deploy, monitor, update/delete, secure and manage multiple mobile apps and devices such as tablets and iPads. Operations include OS/app configuration and updates, app provisioning, remote data wipe and view/control the data for troubleshooting.

Enhance device security and flexibility using retail kiosks and MDM

The efficient method to manage multiple devices is vital for any large-scale outlets. Some features that MDM offers are as follows:

1. Simplified device provisioning and configuring

One of the major advantages of using MDM is device management operations. It is performed in the background without any user interaction. The MDM server is capable of configuring the device with a new account if the VPN infrastructure is updated.  When the employee uses VPN the next time, all the required settings are configured already, so the employee doesn’t need to modify the settings again.

2. Device Manageability

• Keep track of the different factors like device connectivity, uptime or downtime, and kiosks performance.
• Ability to enable device sharing modes and kiosk mode feature to enable efficient sharing.
• Ability to generate reports to analyze the kiosks utilization
• Ability to monitor and generate reports by tracking, diagnosing and resolving device and user related issues
• Stores complete record of all configured e-mail accounts on registered mobile device
• Ability to track and report all the current and previous device locations

3. Device Security

• Setting up strong security policies and standards for particular devices
• Identify password policies and encryption settings.
• Ability to detect and restrict jailbroken devices.
• In the case of the mobile theft, MDM helps in protecting the data in several ways. It can help track the device and remotely lock/wipe it

Managing apps with MDM

MDM solutions help deploy, manage and secure both in-house apps and 3^rd party apps. One can assign mandatory apps to be pushed to all the devices. Potentially dangerous apps can be blacklisted to restrict their installation on the managed devices. Devices can be forced to work in a single app or Kiosk mode whereby the device is locked on to a particular app. The user won’t be able to exit the app environment or accessing anything beyond it.