A Blackburn choice-based letting scheme uses touch-screen kiosks to save costs
We've introduced five computerised information points for our choice-based lettings service: one in each of our four district offices around Blackburn and one in an information centre.

They are designed to complement, not replace, the services of the counter staff and to overcome the problem of the continuing cost of producing a plethora of leaflets that date all too quickly. They provide the same information as the service's website – a view of all the homes available, information about the homes and other information like job vacancies.

To date, four people have been trained one-to-one by Glasser-Whitley, the company that provided the kiosks for us, and two more will be trained. Each person updates their area of specialism, for instance somebody from personnel updates the job vacancies, and the information can be reviewed before it goes live.

The information is updated every Wednesday morning at 9am, but it can be done whenever we like.

Each kiosk cost us £3500, and this includes maintenance for 12 months, training, and provision of a dedicated server as well as the kiosks themselves, which are basically a PC inside a box without a keyboard; they have touch screens instead. The only other cost is the staff time taken up in updating them, but as we can do this at the same time as updating our website.

We chose Glasser-Whitley's system because it was the only one we saw that met all our requirements, not least the need for the kiosks to be wheelchair accessible. The other factors we specified were that they must be wall-mounted, easy to use, compact and robust so that they could be installed in a public space and they must have a print-out facility so that customers can take information away with them.