Westlotto's Kiosk Trial

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Three quick questions to Hans-Jurgen Gartner and Dr. Bernard Dechant of Westlotto, looking at how one of Europe's largest lottery organisations is testing self-service.
 
KIOSK EUROPE: When did the idea first come about to offer self-service terminals to West Lotto lottery customers?
 
HANS-JÜRGEN GÄRTNER: We have been considering self-service for a number of years now, prompted by the retail sector’s great acceptance of the technology. We were also experiencing a new set of pressures from the market and newly-introduced regulation, which needed to be addressed.
The sale of lottery tickets throughout the week is characterised by enormous peaks of demand on the last day, and last couple of hours, before the drawing of the numbers. This,  of course, puts a big strain on the retailers and shop operators selling the tickets. In addition, the authorities do not allow us to operate a website for lottery playing, mainly with regards to the protection of underage participants and gaming addiction prevention. On top of all this, we are not allowed to open a single additional outlet more than 3,910. With resources limited by law, and ever-increasing demand, the question was: how can we increase our capacity without increasing the number of outlets or man hours involved? Self-service seemedto be a possible solution, sowe decided to introduce atest installation of 30 units in North-Rhine Westphalia.
 
KE: So what are the core features of your solution?
 
H-JG: We started out by looking into how a self-service solution could be integrated into the existing POS retailer cash registers. However, after a while we realised that this approach was not going to work, and that we therefore had to look into a stand-alone version to be successful. For our first release we have focused on offering one single product on the terminal – our bread and butter Wednesday and Saturday lottery play. This is to ensure the highest possible client acceptance. The customers’ age is automatically verified by reading age information from the chip of their EC-Card, to comply with government regulations. Cash, therefore, was not an option. Using only cards for payment also has the advantage that all wins can be automatically and immediately credited to the customers’ cards.
 
DR.DECHANT: The interface has been developed to closely resemble our former website, allowing for a continuous customer experience. Choosing IBM as a partner gave us great flexibility in all aspects of the project, right down to the quality components that we chose for the project. It was of paramount importance in this case not to be bound by any pre-determined hardware or software specifications that may have meant higher integration efforts. The application offers customers a number of options to choose the numbers they want to play, or whether they prefer randomly generated numbers, etc, with an intuitive screen layout that resembles the well-known paper slip as closely as possible. When the customer has paid and the transaction is complete, a paper confirmation slip is printed with the chosen numbers and a receipt. As all information is stored centrally losing this slip no longer means missing out on the jackpot – by the time you find out it will already have been wired to your account!
 
KE: What level of acceptance has the new solution received from both customers and shopkeepers alike?
 
H-JG: Our retailers were initially sceptical about the terminals. Playing the lottery is something of a ritual for many members of the population. Would they change their behaviour? How would a busy shopkeeper also deal with a new solution at the busiest of times of the week? and so on. Well, as ever since our retailers saw the customers using the terminals in numbers and freeing them from time-consuming and repetitive tasks in the week’s busiest hours, acceptance has been steadily increasing. We introduced the project to them with road shows and offered promotion teams to assist customers using the terminals for the first time.