April 4, 2017
Since the rise of smartphones, wireless network availability has become an important service in customer-facing business locations. Coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and lounges all post convenient WiFi passwords for their guests to use while enjoying their other services. In these businesses, it’s a welcome luxury, but at the end of the day, the food and coffee is going to taste just as good without an internet connection.
However, it’s different in the hotel industry. Guests at a hotel aren’t staying for a drink or a meal. They’re staying for a night or more and often for business reasons. It is absolutely critical that the hotel offer a strong WiFi connection for their customers.
Recognizing this and seizing an opportunity to differentiate themselves, Cisco Meraki takes this one step further. Using its location analytics, Meraki enables hotels to use the Meraki WiFi connection to improve other items in the facility.
Location Analytics and WiFi’s Insight into Your Customers
- Guest Behavior: Using location analytics, hotel management can tell how frequently guests use their in-house gym, the hotel bar, the hotel restaurant, and lobby. Furthermore, they can tell how long guests are lingering in these locations. It provides a reliable way to determine what is working and measure the effects of investments made to these facilities.
- Return Customers: Location analytics can also note return customers who regularly log into the WiFi. This presents a perfect opportunity to offer VIP packages to these loyal, regular customers.
- Heat Maps: In addition to graphs and charts, location traffic can also be displayed as a heat map. By uploading the floorplan of the hotel, areas of denser guest traffic will appear “warmer” on the map. Management can get a sense of their guest’s behavior at a glance.
Concierge App
Paired with Cisco Spark, Meraki wireless networks can enable the concierge app. Essentially, it is a helpful application offered to hotel guests, so they can receive answers to their questions or staff assistance faster and with less hassle. It leverages the multi-faceted voice, video, and chat capabilities of Cisco Spark to connect guests with a concierge for personalized customer service.
The common problem with these kind of customer service applications is a logistical one. You don’t want to have to staff a centralized contact/call center for the sole purpose of responding to minor customer inquiries, and a centralized contact/call center is going to struggle to answer the specific questions about a specific hotel location in a specific city.
This system is better managed by the professionals working in that particular hotel. Meraki circumvents this whole conundrum. Using the integrated Bluetooth radio in select Meraki endpoints, the Meraki device enables the concierge app to only function on the hotel grounds and connects its users to local staff to answer questions.
More than Analytics and an App
As powerful as these Meraki features are, they are ancillary benefits of the product. In addition to location analytics, Meraki still provides a strong WiFi connection in a format designed to meet a hotel’s business needs. Offering one access point per room and wired ports for VOIP, Meraki can help your customers access the internet for business and entertainment alike.
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For Further Reading
Making a WLAN Decision: Meraki Cloud or Cisco Premise-Based?