H&C News meets with suppliers regularly to keep up to date with the latest product and service innovations, aiming to get the inside track on what companies offer to the market and how it is delivered.
This week, we met with Elena Briola, VP Marketing of Cloud4Wi at the technology provider’s London office to gain a better understanding of the business.
Cloud4Wi helps brands get more out of their Wi-Fi networks to provide superior on-site mobile experiences and gain valuable insights. Its Volare services platform for advanced guest Wi-Fi enables UK hospitality brands to offer in-store customers a bespoke mobile welcome experience, learn more about customer behaviour, and meaningfully engage consumers on-site via their mobile devices.
Providing guest Wi-Fi is fast becoming the norm across the hospitality industry. What do you think are the reasons for this?
As smartphone and app usage continues to grow, guest Wi-Fi is a service that customers increasingly expect as standard. They don’t want to use up valuable mobile data allowances if they can help it – within hospitality this is all the more pertinent as they are enjoying downtime and are more likely to use data at their leisure rather than out of necessity.
For tourists in particular, hospitality venues often provide a vital bridge back to their home lives – they are reliant on free Wi-Fi provision to update their social media, check emails and learn about the latest news in their home country.
Yet the problem is too many hospitality businesses still see the provision of this guest Wi-Fi as an inconvenient necessity. They don’t want customers to be dissatisfied and they know that rival venues offer it, so they just go ahead and provide some form of basic Wi-Fi service without investing proper time and energy into delivering a service that will add real value. This is a huge missed opportunity for venues to gather insights about their customers and build valuable relationships with them, giving them personalised content in a timely and efficient manner.
So how does Cloud4Wi solve this issue for hospitality venues?
We enable these businesses to offer a far more advanced guest Wi-Fi service and actually grow their brands by leveraging the Wi-Fi to provide superior on-site mobile experiences while gaining valuable customer insights.
We create Wi-Fi welcome portal for customers to log into, thus revealing to hospitality venues who is actually using the Wi-Fi, what they’re using the Wi-Fi for, and what might potentially be interesting to them in terms of promotions and special offers.
The technology to deliver advanced guest Wi-Fi is already here and can be deployed without having to overhaul businesses’ existing infrastructures. There is also a significant marketing advantage to the technology, in that once you know who your Wi-Fi guests are, you can create triggered campaigns through a range of channels, so that different customers receive relevant, personalised content via SMS, emails, push notifications etc.
You can use your portal to promote your social media pages so that these customers quickly become Instagram or Twitter followers of Facebook fans. You can also integrate guest Wi-Fi with your email database – feeding all new users logging onto Wi-Fi into your existing email lists before segmenting them by demographic data in order to send the most relevant email updates to the most relevant audiences.
What sort of information can businesses collect about their customers, and why is this so useful?
The information gathered could be as simple as a customer’s email address, or – depending on the Wi-Fi login method you offer to customers and subject to local data privacy regulations – it could be name and demographic data such as birthday/date, gender, telephone number and home address for mailings.
Your customers will, in most cases, readily provide the requested information, because they appreciate free Internet and they already like your business or they wouldn’t be there. The result is a list of your most loyal and often most frequent customers, all of whom have agreed to receive your messages.
Furthermore, it’s now possible using presence technology to take information from existing Wi-Fi access points to determine individual customer locations – even if the customer isn’t logged onto the Wi-Fi at the time – providing valuable insights about footfall and how customers are navigating the store.
What are the other major advantages of deploying advanced guest Wi-Fi?
There are all manner of additional benefits. Most notably, you can quickly and easily provide clear benefits for customers who share their information, above and beyond just free Internet access. Coupons, loyalty programmes, and other benefits – accessible via the Wi-Fi portal or delivered via personalised messages – are a way to build valuable relationships with customers and keep them returning to your business.
If your business has an existing mobile app, this can now be easily integrated. Our Volare Dev Suite has new libraries so that mobile apps can use Volare Wi-Fi onboarding or trigger a mobile engagement campaign using beacons.
We can also help brands to precisely filter the target of an engagement campaign considering factors such as beacon-presence, demographic profiles, and location.
Finally, ease of management is absolutely pivotal for our customers. They don’t want individual store managers to have to be IT experts, but they do need individual stores to be able to launch their own personalised offers and messages. Because of this, we’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for IT, marketing, and channel partners to manage their own business and operational requirements. This means letting IT managers control the overall guest Wi-Fi service provision, giving brand owners the ability to create a consistent look for their welcome portal across all locations, and still letting individual venue managers promote local offers while central marketers handle business-wide offers and promotions.
While many brands initially deploy Volare as a custom welcome portal, the platform includes a large portfolio of customer engagement options. The marketing team can add various services from Volare on an a la carte basis, learn which campaigns are effective for their customers, and measure customer satisfaction and business revenue increases.
Given that so many businesses already have Wi-Fi, what’s the size of the market opportunity as you see it?
Many businesses have some form of Wi-Fi, but the big advantage of our platform is that it can be overlayed on existing Wi-Fi networks to give businesses more advanced functionality – that’s where the opportunity lies for us.
Consequently, the services platforms for guest Wi-Fi market is expected to be worth $25B by 2020. There’s massive potential here and we’ve recently received $8 million in private funding with the investment aimed at accelerating our growth.
H & C News comment:
We enjoyed meeting with Elena. Guest wi-fi is a fast growing market, which as smartphone and app usage continues to grow, is a service that customers increasingly expect as standard. Cloud4wi have recognised that too many hospitality businesses still see the provision of guest Wi-Fi as an inconvenient necessity and are providing a service that means that customers and businesses can benefit alike. We wish them every success.
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