By Elena Briola, VP Marketing of Cloud4Wi
One of the most significant retail trends created by the mobile era is customer demand for free Wi-Fi. This demand represents an enormous, yet underutilized opportunity for retailers. We’re referring to what’s known as advanced guest Wi-Fi, a burgeoning approach to engaging retail customers that is rapidly on its way to being a strategic competitive weapon for any organization with brick and mortar locations.
Advanced guest Wi-Fi is differentiated from the standard Wi-Fi offered at your local coffee shop by a host of branded features and services, often leveraging location-based technologies, in order to benefit both the retail shopper and the retailer providing the service. Unlike free Wi-Fi offered as a convenience, retailers are actively incentivizing their shoppers to use advanced guest Wi-Fi services.
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Why? Because advanced guest Wi-Fi allows retailers to understand and engage customers in ways never before possible. Advanced guest Wi-Fi provides real-time information about customers who are in stores and gives retailers tools to communicate personalized offers, based on immediate and past shopping histories. It also offers actionable insights that enable retailers to make business decisions that will accelerate growth and drive new revenues, while simultaneously creating stronger bonds between retail customers and their brand.
What to look for in advanced guest Wi-Fi platforms
Advanced guest Wi-Fi is available from multiple vendors in various forms, with differing feature sets and requirements. Some vendors provide all three in a single cloud-based platform, while others offer them separately. Some offerings work only with the vendor’s own Access Point (AP) hardware, while others are hardware agnostic and work with any Wi-Fi hardware the retailer is already using.
For retailers considering advanced guest Wi-Fi, they should think about three key issues when evaluating their potential platforms.
- Hardware Agnosticism – The platform should be capable of working on multiple types of hardware. For brands with many locations across different states and even countries, it’s likely you’re going to encounter different Wi-Fi hardware depending on the mall, network VAR, or other conditions. Make sure this platform works on everything.
- Easy Integration with Existing Applications – This platform should integrate with other CRM, marketing, and BI services. Many times brands will want to use their own point solution for something specific (like a pre-existing customer loyalty program or marketing automation software for example). A great advanced guest Wi-Fi platform will offer easy APIs and integration tools that enable it work with any system the brand may already have in place.
- OTT for Ease-of-Use – Having a platform that delivers a single Over-The-Top (OTT) cloud layer over all existing hardware and applications usually makes for the simplest means of implementation, as well as providing a platform that can consolidate all services under a single interface. By doing so, retailers can deliver the same services and gather the same information across all locations regardless of the individual challenges presented by different locations. By having an OTT architecture that is intuitive and delivers an all-encompassing solution set that’s still capable of integrating with existing applications, a retailer can cover all of their bases while still ensuring they’re getting the most from their investment in Wi-Fi.
Regardless of which solution a retailer selects, the important issue is that retailers carefully evaluate advanced guest Wi-Fi as a means to engage with its customer base. Very soon, those without that engagement channel will find themselves behind the curve with respect to their competitive landscape. Take a look at advanced guest Wi-Fi today!
Elena has more than ten years of marketing, technical and economic expertise in the wireless industry. Currently Elena serves as CMO of Cloud4Wi and is responsible for all areas of marketing and communications, including product marketing, marketing communications, corporate communications and internal communications. Moreover, she has written several articles and reports on new generation wireless technologies. Elena started her career at Telecom Italia Labs in Turin, where she performed advanced Research & Development activities on mobile access networks. Then she moved to WiTech, where she served as CMO in the last period. She held a Degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Pisa.
