Imagine if you were greeted by your name when you enter a luxury resort. As you roam around the hotel, everybody in the staff seems to know your preferences. Your phone becomes the key to your hotel room. You can get to your room from anywhere in a multi-acre resort with precise directions using an app. You can see your bill on your phone at the reception when you are checking out and even make payments with the app using your fingerprint to authorise it. All of this using experiences surfacing within the right context at the right location without the need to provide any information from your end. Welcome to the world where micro-location combines with context driven experiences using beacons.

‘Beacons’ was made popular and mainstream by Apple, when it adapted it with iBeacons around a year ago. With Beacons, we can now connect a whole set of technologies to provide a rich contextual, personalized experience. As somebody said, context is the new persuasion and Beacons are a great enabler of real time context, leading to great experiences and thus driving persuasion. At a very basic level, Beacons is a relatively simple, yet cool piece of micro-location technology which allows you to identify a person’s presence with a very high degree of accuracy (upto 1 foot) using low powered Bluetooth emitters. Assuming that privacy concerns are addressed and consumers acknowledge the app and opt-in to benefit from this, it has the potential to revolutionize in-store/ in-venue micro-location based experiences. There are a number of players across industries that are already running pilot projects creating fantastic experiences using beacons. Some of the well-know early adopters are:

  • Apple—enable in-store mode— offer upgrades, reviews, surface your order number when you are near service desk, schedule Genius bar appointments in store;
  • Starwood—greet guests by names, accelerated check-in;
  • MLB—mobile check-ins, pushing merchandise coupons and seat upgrades, surfacing location specific content;
  • Macys—pushing discounts and product recommendations.

Using Beacons, you could create region and geo-fences in-store to identify your customers as they enter and exit these zones. As a retailer, knowing where your consumer is in the store with a high degree of accuracy combined with all the other context that your app can provide about the consumer (for example, purchase history, user preference, user demographic) is priceless. Marketers can use that information to:

  • Attract—Users can see a personalised curated catalogue when they are near the store as they are browsing the mall. They can also see a personalised greeting and a customised offer.
  • Engage—As consumers browse the store and come near a particular product aisle, they can see product details, reviews and videos surface on their phone. Marketers could display personalised promotion based on how much time the consumer spends in front of a certain merchandize by guessing intent. One could also have way-finding directions across the store based on where  the consumer is and shopping list on his/her app. Marketers could even integrate it with the brand’s loyalty programmes.
  • Evaluate—Based on the store recommendation algorithms, marketers can offer alternate choices or comparison with other items in store based on where the user is standing and the amount of time that he/she has spent there, guess intent and help create an experience of serendipitous discovery with experts.
  • Transact
    —Surface offers to cross sell at the POS(Point of Sale)
    —Allow mobile payments to leverage proximity to the POS and fingerprint authorisation on the smartphone.
    Based on which aisle he/she spent time, recommend real time personalised offers on the product when the consumer is leaving the store without buying.
  • Reassure—As users walk into store, they could indicate that they want to return a merchandise or a service request via an app. It could automatically place them in the queue and give them an indication of wait time and leave them free to browse the store instead of waiting. When the support associate is available, he/she could locate users in the store and walk over to help them out.

As a big box retailer, this gives marketers new opportunities to leverage their greatest asset – the brick and mortar store to provide a delightful, uber experience which cannot be replicated by an e-commerce portal. It allows brands to combine the physical and digital world and make it really interesting and engaging for consumers.

Beacons have the potential to create unparalleled experiences which reduce friction and increase efficiency across:

  • Amusement parks—Limitless possibility across the park including curating your experiences with your photos captured at designated areas (assuming you have opted in) and seamlessly sent to you or your social media accounts, if you desire. It can make waiting in lines a thing of past.
  • Bar/cafe—When you walk into the bar/café and the attendant knows you and your favourite drink (even ready, if ordered ahead of time). You can even make the payment using your app, beacons and authorise it using your fingerprint.
  • Education/Museums—Having additional details surface seamlessly when you are in front of an exhibit.
  • Gym—Get on the treadmill and it surfaces your settings and program based on your preference and training plan.
  • Home automation—Walk into a room and the lights/ music/AC setting changes as per your custom settings seamlessly. If both you and your spouse walk in, obviously your spouse’s setting would get preference.
  • Healthcare—As you navigate through the hospital or clinic, you are recognised and based on your health profile and treatment you are assured of the right treatment without any confusion or scope of human errors.

As you can conclude by now, there are limitless experiences that you can innovate, design and create – limited only by your imagination and creativity. The world is truly your oyster with technology.

By Prashant Mehta
The author is vice president, co-lead of mobility, SCG, SapientNitro