In today’s age of never-ending struggle to boost loyalty and enhance customer engagement, beacons provide businesses with a competitive edge to build more a personal relationship with their customers. Adding on to it, unlike other location based technologies such as Near Field Communication (NFC), which is limited to Android devices and detectable only within a range of a few inches, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology is supported by all major mobile platforms.

Thus, the accessibility of iBeacon technology coupled with the rise in the adoption of smartphones, suggest that now is the right time for businesses to drive customer engagement through the use of beacons.

If you are just beginning to read about beacons, our Beacon 101 ebook is a good place to start. In this post, we will discuss in detail about how beacons are transforming customer engagement across different verticals.

1. Banks:

Enhance the waiting experience

Waiting in line at a bank is one of the things that most customers hate. With the help of beacons, banks can put this waiting time to good use by sending relevant digital content, based on the profile and interests of customers to keep them occupied. Recently, Harbin Bank in China reported that most customers found educational digital content on various services offered by the bank to be highly helpful. Therefore, you could use beacons to engage your customers by delivering digital content right from news on banking services, banking ‘how to’ videos or guides to stock prices, directly to their mobile device.

2. Theme Parks:

Engage visitors better with interactive content

Theme parks have been trying to establish a direct relationship with their visitors for long. Beacons help them create engaging mobile apps that use contextual information to beautifully combine the colorful environment with digital content. Fluwel’s Tulpenland (Tulip Land), a theme park that specializes in displaying Dutch tulips recently joined forces with LabWerk, an Amsterdam-based startup to revolutionize the theme park experience using iBeacon technology. With the help of a mobile application, the theme park uses this new technology to take customer visits beyond the traditional signs.

The app uses interactive content in a diverse range of formats and other added functionalities like quizzes and rewards to engage their visitors better. That way there is something for everyone, irrespective of their level of engagement.

3. University Campuses

Control in-room lights, projectors and more

Image Courtesy: proxima.io

World class lecture rooms and amphi-theatres within university campuses can now leverage beacon technology to allow staff and students to control and interact with the physical space around them, using smartphones.

The new TAFE Tonsley Park campus in South Australia , for example, tightly integrates Estimote beacons with a beacon platform to make controlling in-room lights, projectors and screens an intuitive user experience. With around 200 iBeacons installed all over the campus, the platform triggers lights and systems in the classrooms to be activated as soon as staff and students walk-in. These beacons detect staff/students’ smartphones and give them instant access to the lights and projectors in the room.

To learn more about ideas on how event managers, banks, theme parks, university campuses etc can use beacons to improve customer engagement , read our post on How Beacons can help enhance Customer Engagement.

If you are planning a beacon pilot, take a look at Beaconstac, that includes everything you need to get started. Using Beaconstac you can set up your own campaign, without a developer’s help!

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• Author Details

Author Details

Devika Girish

Enthusiastic about marketing technology and helping businesses achieve greater ROI.

devika@mobstac.com

This blog was originally published on August 27th, 2014 at 07:18 pm