Analytics Infograpic.

WiFi is no longer just a conduit to connect to the Internet. If used properly, it is a connection to the world, and all of the opportunities it holds. As the South African business IT landscape moves away from outdated 20th century tech, the increased focus is placed on the Internet of things (IOT).

This focus demands insights that can be gathered from wired and wireless tech, including mobile, while facilitating the journey to the cloud. In the fast food and retail sector in particular, any downtime means exponential losses, and customer insights are crucial to the continuous garnering of brand equity and operational efficiency.

According to Brad Fraser, Infoprotect CEO, customers experience various pain points in their endeavour to capture and action these insights. “The main pain points experienced include the balancing of opportunity with risk, the speed of innovation, which drives faster ‘refresh cycles’, and the essential insights that must be gathered from the mobile generation’s experiences.”

Analytics Infograpic.

As such, Infoprotect has partnered with Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, to deliver an effective, efficient full-stack solution. “Networks are moving from legacy IT network requirements to a service delivery focus. In this modern age, cellphones and tablets are increasingly becoming the preferred network devices – and these offer a wealth of data-driven opportunities,” confirms Pieter Engelbrecht, Business Unit Manager at HPE Aruba. “Considering the synergy between HPE Aruba and Infoprotect’s offerings, it was inevitable that we would partner to offer WiFi as a service to drive this tech shift.”

WiFi as a service includes guest WiFi, which allows fast food and retail businesses to grow their databases, enrich visitor insights and market to visitors in real-time. This enables data capturing, progressive profiling, multi-venue configuration, configurable templates, content delivery and social login options. “The powerful insights are captured and visualised within the intuitive, configurable cloud-based Skyfii Analytics and marketing solution,” adds Fraser. “The dashboards and reports generated are designed to empower data-driven decisions within both marketing and operations teams.”

Analytics Infograpic.

Essential to network management, intelligent reporting delivers measurements such as foot traffic counts, keeping unique guest tallies and identifying peak visitor times. Geo-fencing technology defines areas of interest while heat mapping allows the tracking of visitors in real-time. By understanding how customers spend their time engaging with a business, and how they utilise the WiFi, targeted marketing strategies can be developed.

Through the correlation of various data sources, strategies become driven by behavioural segmentation and proximity targeting, attributing marketing campaigns to real visitor behaviour and, ultimately, leading to greater success. It all begins with a good quality guest WiFi experience, building a rich customer database, and then, through the use of behavioural data, marketing to customers in a real-time, contextual and relevant fashion to drive loyalty and sales.

In addition, mobile first networks are designed to address business and IT challenges. “These platforms act as the intelligent software layer between network infrastructure components, third party IT services, and business and end-user facing applications,” adds Engelbrecht. “This, combined with a reliable and secure analytics and location engine, offers access to contextual data crucial to effective business intelligence.”

Together, the companies will be empowered to host, provide connectivity (WAN, LAN), offer business services and manage customers’ entire networks from end-to-end, utilising a state-of-the-art data centre, and ensuring the utmost in data security and analytical insights.

“The key is to have everything under one roof, facilitated by an ecosystem of experts in all network requirements. When partnering with companies, we consider their internal skill sets, infrastructure and certifications, and Infoprotect delivers on all fronts. With Skyfii and HPE Aruba offering product solutions, and Infoprotect managing everything in between, we truly believe success is inevitable,” concludes Engelbrecht.

This article was originally published on IT Web.