Overview
Customer Wi-Fi has gone from being a nice-to-have to a necessity for many hospitality businesses. It remains a contentious issue, with small, independent operators in particular finding it hard to balance encouraging customers to visit against discouraging them from staying too long. It’s certainly clear that hospitality operators are providing a ‘third space’ between home and work, and for many the rise of mobile workers has been valuable to their bottom line, especially for the mid-morning and mid-afternoon day parts. One of the additional benefits is the customer insight your broadband can offer (see critical functions, below).
Wireless internet access in a cafe or restaurant is much the same as Wi-Fi at home: a wired connection from your local telephone exchange comes into the venue to a router, then the router enables devices to connect to the internet wirelessly using radio waves. The difference, like most other equipment you’d have in your venue, is it has to be much more robust than what you’d have at home. There are lots of companies out there who will provide business Wi-Fi: try Openreach or price comparison sites like Broadband Choices to find out what’s available. If you have multiple sites, it might be worth paying more for a company that serves all your venues than having a patchwork of providers to keep on top of.
Critical functions
Customers are typically prepared to share a certain amount of personal data in exchange for getting free, reliable Wi-Fi in your venue. Giving them the option to use their Facebook, Twitter or other social media profile to log in to your Wi-Fi allows you to build a profile of that customer, and to market to them after the visit if they give you permission. When selecting a provider, you’ll want to ask them which social networks they work with, and how you can leverage this data for marketing purposes. This could include emailing or messaging them directly, if they give you permission. This issue of permission is important: not just because sending marketing messages can be seen as intrusive, but because GDPR means you have to get permission to do so, or face a hefty fine.
As well as the ability to market to customers, many Wi-Fi service providers can provide aggregate data about footfall in your venues, as well as benchmarking data for how you might compare to other operators in the sector. While this may sound valuable, you should always consider whether you will have time to review this data, and what you might practically do with it. For example, say your footfall data tells you that you’re especially quiet mid-morning. Do you need software to tell you this, or could you get the same information from your POS system? And if the insight is genuinely useful, what will you do to address it? Ensure you allow time and budget for actioning the insight, otherwise there’s no point.
Important integrations
Many Wi-Fi systems will offer a dashboard or reporting system allowing you to analyse the data within the system. However, you may want to export this data into your CRM system, and/or your data and insights software, to combine it with other data. Check before you buy that this is possible and whether there are any restrictions.
You may also need to integrate the Wi-Fi system (or any related marketing applications) with your POS system, to ensure any offers you send can be redeemed at the till.
Don’t forget, if you’re running business-critical systems like POS on Wi-Fi, you should create separate, password-protected wireless networks for these. That will prevent your customers potentially interrupting business operations by downloading large files.
Users
Naturally your customers will be using your Wi-Fi, but it’s helpful to think which ones. If your venues are in towns and cities, they probably have good 3G/4G coverage, so the people using Wi-Fi are likely to be either laptop users or tourists. Think carefully about what (if anything) you would do differently to market to these groups.
Your marketing team or consultant will probably also make good use of the data the system generates. They would also need to submit any text and images to create marketing campaigns. If you’re a small operator without a dedicated marketing function, make sure the system you buy is simple enough to be managed by anyone.
