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.

We recently published a blog on ‘6 Ways to Utilize Beacon Analytics across Verticals‘, where we have talked about how beacons help businesses engage their customer better by gaining real-time access to consumer behaviour intelligence. Here are a few:

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.

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.

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.

To learn more about how beacon analytics can be utilized across various verticals such as:

– Airlines

– Hotels

– Theme Parks

read our post on ‘6 Ways Beacon to Utilize Analytics across Verticals‘. It talks about how 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!