6 Ways to Utilize Beacon Analytics Across Verticals

Today’s ‘ever-connected’ consumers love hassle-free convenience, and they expect businesses to cater to their needs across multiple channels. Yet the amount of insight that various verticals have for each of these channels vary widely. For example, today’s multichannel retailers use a wide variety of big data, right from their online store to mobile app and in-store. Ideally, such massive amounts of data should help retailers provide an enhanced customer shopping experience with ease. However, tying these different silos of data together is no easy task.

Similarly, though beacons are popularly touted as a retailer-focused opportunity, of late these new proximity detection devices have stimulated appetite of people from various verticals such as malls, museums etc. One of the main factors that drew their attention is the ability of beacons to help them gain deep insights on consumer behaviour intelligence and effectively forecast staffing needs, and evaluate how various factors such as promotions and merchandising impact sales conversions.

If you are a retailer looking to bridge online and offline channels by integrating beacons and mobile, our latest ebook titled ‘How brands and retailers can go omnichannel using beacons’ is a good place to start with. In this post, we will be talking about how various verticals can use beacons to engage their consumers better by gaining real-time access to consumer behaviour intelligence.

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Restaurants

1. Retain loyal patrons by rewarding them for spending time with you

In the case of restaurants, an uplifting customer experience can not only help draw in new customers through word of mouth publicity but also enhance customer loyalty. Beacons can help you drive engagements by easily intertwining your customers’ needs and preferences with discounts on frequently ordered items, offers on free drinks etc.

Mook, a German restaurant group, for example, recently integrated their existing mobile app with beacons to reward their customers for spending time at the restaurant. These tiny devices are used to keep track of the amount of time spent by customers at the group’s establishments. The app then uses this information to assign ratings such as ‘addicted connoisseur’, and ‘guest’ based on time spent at the restaurant. Customers with higher ratings are rewarded with offers such as a free drink or a quick table allotment on their arrival.

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2. Use customer purchase history data to tailor personalized experiences

Though beacons are best known for pushing contextually relevant notifications to customers, overwhelming your users with a number of promotions and notifications can nudge them to un-install your app. This can be avoided by effectively utilizing customer purchase history data collected by beacons, to gain a deep understanding of the kind of value offering might work well with a customer. For example, say your beacon data tells you that a certain customer has bookmarked sushi as a favourite dish, loves dining at the terrace of your restaurant and is allergic to prawns. When this customer walks by your restaurant any other day, you can engage him/her better by automatically pushing a notification – offering a table on the terrace and a special discount on sushi. At the same time, you can trigger an alert to hotel staff informing them about this particular customer’s allergy. Thus beacons empower you with the ability to ensure that your customers have a dedicated ‘personal concierge’ type of experience.

Image Source: customerparadigm.com

San Francisco Soup Company, one of Bay Area’s popular quick service soup, sandwich and salad chain, for example, recently used beacons to accurately market their services to their target audience by collecting customer data. The restaurant chain leverages beacons to automatically identify loyalty program members with Bluetooth-enabled smartphones when they are near a specific location. Once a member is identified, the program empowers its members with the ability to find the chain’s nearest outlet, earn loyalty points and redeem rewards through their smartphones.

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Theme parks

3. Align your staff schedules with visitor traffic

Beacons help you reduce labor and operational costs based on insights gained from theme park traffic patterns such as the number of beacon hits and customer dwell time at beacons within a specified time and date range, busiest hours throughout the day or week etc. You can then use this information for better allocation of staff and services. For example, you can use these real-time analytics data to determine how many staff members should be performing at various places in the park at a given point of time, or when more staff should be added to help out visitors at various rides etc. This data-driven approach, combined with a carefully designed template for managing labor costs effectively, empowers you to optimize workforce distribution, enhance operational efficiency, and ultimately reduce expenses.

4. Provide improved parking facilities

During busy weekends, most visitors usually end up going round and round searching for a parking space in vain. But with beacons, as soon as a shopper enters your mall, you can trigger a notification about the number of parking spots available and direct them to the nearest one.

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Hotels

5. Optimize staff productivity without disturbing guests

With beacons, hotels can easily find out which rooms are available for cleaning at a given point of time. For example, in this case, it would be the rooms of guests who have either checked out or are currently not present in their rooms. Making this information available to your housekeeping staff will help optimize their productivity as they will not spend time knocking from door to door, checking if the rooms are free. You can also use this data to send alerts if a specific area has not been serviced as per schedule. This also helps you ensure that your housekeeping staff don’t end up disturbing a guest from time to time.

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Airlines

6. Optimize dining and retail layouts at airports

When it comes to airlines, one of the best uses of beacon-enabled mobile apps is floor maps. Beacons help airlines enhance their revenue potential by gaining better insights on navigational patterns of passengers within the airport, and finding the most popular locations at the airport, by tracking the areas with maximum customer dwell time. You can then use this information to optimize dining, retail and entertainment layouts in those popular areas according to the needs and interests of your passengers.

Thus, beacons can help businesses use real-time analytics information to come up with actionable insights that will in turn help them generate more revenue.

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!

• Author Details

Author Details

Devika Girish

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