Kiosk at Railway stations - Whats the experience

CRIS has plans to deploy 1100 Kiosks at most of the Railway Stations in India to facilitate ticketing. I have already seen such Kiosks at most of the suburban railway stations on Western Railway in Mumbai. While the initiative is laudable, it important to track the usage of these Kiosks and the experience & actual value offered by them to the users.

I am keen to know the experience of users who have used these Kiosks by purchasing the smart cards, like

How was the experience ? Was the transaction time lesser than waiting in the queue ? Would you use these Kiosks again ?

Exciting times for Kiosks industry

The sleeping giant is waking up, as they say !

The Kiosk industry in India has been existent since 1999 but has not taken off due to various reasons:

a) Motive for Kiosk deployment: Most of the early deployers looked at it as a novelty instead of creating an alternate medium for reaching the target markets or for transactions
b) this lead to the lack of clarity on the Return On Investments for the Kiosk projects
c) and this culminated into the customer insistance on a Cheap or Low cost Kiosks which compromised on quality, reliability and customer experience.

This has lead to customer skepticism & phobia for Kiosk deployments.

The new player in the Kiosk industry, viz. President is set to change this.

The market is already evolving and organisations have started initiating Kiosk projects for Ticketing & Billing applications. The Indian market for Kiosks is set to explode in the next two years.