However, at the same time it has never been more important for you to maintain customer and guest engagement and to optimise the customer experience. Doing this while struggling with staff shortfalls is a gargantuan task, and one that you will need to use every tool available to overcome. One such tool, and one that is often overlooked, is your Guest WiFi.
How can your Guest WiFi help? By making your digital communications completely seamless, automating your conversations with your guests, and helping convert them from customers into enthusiastic brand advocates for you and your business. Below, we’ll be looking at ways you can achieve this.
Data
It all starts with data; specifically customer data automatically collected via your Guest WiFi. Whether your business is large, small, independent, or part of a chain or franchise, this data collection can be done to suit your existing processes and budget. Different systems will allow you to handle different quantities of data in a sophisticated but simple way.
The system you use should be flexible, and capable of capturing the data that you require. For example, for hotels this might include the hotel room number, and this can be matched against your booking system, although this may require some third-party integration to set up. When data is captured, and matched to customers, it will provide insights that deliver value. Fundamentally, this is a customer relationship management system (CRM) of your customers that is owned by your business and is growing on a daily basis.
The data you capture can minimise the amount of manual data entry that your staff will have to do, saving time and streamlining the customer journey. This is essential right now when you are short-staffed. Every moment of your personnel’s time needs to be spent on productive tasks. At the same time, it will give you detailed, actionable insights into your customers, their behaviour and requirements, allowing you to better cater to their needs and optimise their guest experience.
Validation
Getting the data is important, but it doesn’t matter how much data you gather if you can’t be sure that it’s accurate. For example, a good WiFi service will be able to automatically detect whether an email address is genuine, helping to ensure that your data remains as accurate as possible without any manual checking required from staff. Email is still by far the most preferred communications tool in hospitality and retail for a number of reasons including accuracy, longevity and it’s universal readability of info beyond image based content.
Segmentation
Once you have your data and you’ve verified that it’s accurate, you can start putting it to work for you by providing insights into your customers. One of the most powerful ways it can do this is by allowing you to segment your customers and tailor your messaging more accurately to each group.
Doing this allows you to talk about what interests them about your business, making your marketing communications and customer engagement more relevant and maximising the chances of repeat custom. It also allows you to identify individuals as real human beings and to understand better, and help accordingly. Remember, although email is a great communications tool, you will get better engagement if you communicate with customers at different touchpoints in the customer journey. If you use these WiFi tools correctly, you will maximise the chances of repeat custom and increased revenue. After all, finding new customers costs five times as much as holding onto existing customers .
Automated Marketing
By leveraging your data in this way, you can start to automate your marketing efforts, and digitalise the conversations you’re having with your customers. You can combine the data you’ve acquired with marketing automation to provide your guests with the information they require, improving their guest experience. For example, if you want to set up an automated marketing campaign, segmenting your list will be made much easier using the data from your Guest WiFi.
By using marketing automation, and by communicating across multiple platforms at once, you can create a seamless, multichannel marketing presence for your business. You can create automated workflows based on customer behaviour and your business needs. This will allow you to provide your customer with the information they require, when and in the manner in which they wish to receive it. By having multiple conversations, potentially with multiple customers who are visiting together, you can create a unified brand experience that will keep them coming back again and again. All while minimising the manual tasks that are usually required for communicating with customers.
Other things to think about
So, you’ve decided that creating a seamless digital experience for your customers is the right thing to do. Great! But what else do you need to consider creating a world-class customer WiFi service?
A good customer WiFi service should always include the ability to customise the insights it gives you, allowing you to adapt to different customer groups or interrogate the data in different ways to gain the maximum amount of actionable information. It should also be adaptable enough to integrate your existing processes.
You should also be able to use your WiFi to track user behaviour. For example, a good system will tell you the ‘dwell time” that a user spends in a given location, giving you valuable insights into how they are using your venue. For example, in hospitality this will allow you to better plan housekeeping, energy usage and operational processes, allowing you to make the most of the staff you have available.
Conclusion
In the post-lockdown world, many businesses are struggling with rapidly increasing demand simultaneous with a severe shortage of staff. This risks impacting your customers’ experience, damaging your reputation and having repercussions for your ability to attract repeat custom.
A seamless digital experience provided by a robust and reliable cloud-based Guest WiFi platform will allow you to provide a great customer experience even when you are short-staffed. This may seem like a expense but investing in time saving technology will save up to 20 hours per week of your valuable staff resource. The right system will provide seamless integration, minimising manual data entry, facilitating ongoing automated communication with your guests or customers and ultimately doing more business with them.
If you need help to create a seamless digital experience through WiFi speak to the Freedom Hotspot team. Call us on on 0800 311 2190 or email us at info@freedomhotspot.com.