Delivering on the Brand Promise of Maximum Uptime for Xook’s Food Kiosks

Xook kiosks incorporate multiple subsystems such as dispensers, cleaning units, and other hardware modules tailor-made for the machine’s compact design. As Xook is driving a new consumer behavior – relying on machines to serve fresh food, any time, anywhere – the company needed a way to ensure that the subsystems within its autonomous kiosks are delivering on its brand promise of “Good food. Anytime. Every time.” 

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As Rajagopal Natarajan, Xook CEO, explains: “Users shouldn’t have to wonder whether the kiosk is up and running when they want something to eat.”

To achieve 24/7 uptime for its kiosks, Xook sought a remote monitoring and management solution to provide information about its machines in real-time, as well as the ability to troubleshoot and send commands when there’s a problem. The company explored a number of options, both open-source and commercially available.

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“Before we worked with Xyte, we explored a variety of other products. One of the things that convinced us to go with Xyte was the extent to which they understood the business use cases,” Natarajan said. In addition to remote monitoring and management, packaging the data, and subscription management, “there are a lot of ancillary use cases in which Xyte hit it out of the park.”

Xook implemented the Xyte Device Cloud for its kiosks with two main initial use cases in mind: providing exceptional customer service and driving innovation in its product roadmap. Xook configures event-based triggers in its hardware and subsystems; through Xyte, the company can proactively see when there are issues with any of the subsystems in its kiosks, and then send remote commands to course correct when something goes wrong.

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“Without the customer telling us, we proactively see if there’s an issue with the machine, and we can reach out to the customer to let them know before they’re even aware, letting them know that we’re working on it. That’s very powerful,” Natarajan said.

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The second area in which Xook is leveraging Xyte’s Device Cloud is in the engineering and product innovation team. The data and analytics collected through Xyte are passed onto Xook, giving the team a deeper understanding of how their kiosks are being used by customers and any issues they may be encountering.

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“It’s important for our engineers to understand what’s going on with our deployments across the globe,” Natarajan said. “Xyte keeps us connected with our products, giving us a window into understanding consumer usage and system stability. We’re able to focus on our core competencies and workflows while capitalizing on the infrastructure that Xyte has built around data collection from our different IoT systems. The usage analytics and insights are critical building blocks for the next version of the product and additional features we want to develop.”

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Currently Xook operates in the enterprise market, but in the future, when the company begins offering its kiosks to smaller and mid-sized businesses, Natarajan said he can envision using Xyte’s subscription management tools. “I’m looking forward to the flexibility that comes with the platform as we approach the long tail.”

• Facilitates a superior customer experience, in which users know Xook kiosks are always available for fresh, tasty food
• Proactively and remotely monitors and identifies when there are problems in the kiosks or its subsystems
• Resolves incidents quickly and remotely through commands
• Provides analytics and data on usage patterns and system performance, leading to new innovations and data-driven product development decisions

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