For the 119th U.S. Open Championship at Pebble Beach, Cisco delivered the most connected U.S. Open in history. With over 200,000 expected in attendance, the USGA wanted to provide new ways for fans to consume and share content, both on-site and around the world. As 156 golfers and hundreds of thousands of fans walked the course, Meraki provided first of its kind, course-wide Wi-Fi. This included wireless for indoor, outdoor, and the first-ever test of Wi-Fi 6 access points at a major sporting event.
“For the first time ever, thanks to Cisco, we had the confidence that our fans would be able to stay connected to all the action inside the ropes and with friends and family back home no matter where they went on the course.” – Amanda Weiner, Senior Director, Digital Media, USGA
Hundreds of access points were deployed in a matter of days to blanket an ultra high density environment, and close to 39TB of internet traffic was transferred during the event. 70,000 unique clients roamed across the four-mile long Pebble Beach course, during a nationally televised event with 32 million people watching.
While Meraki Access Points are deployed in stadiums, golf courses add several unique challenges. These include the size of the course, weather conditions, and variability of Wi-Fi hot zones. Physical mounting, directional antennas, and RF settings must be configured to ensure a seamless fan experience. In addition, high-density areas like the media center and U.S. Open merchandise tent needed to be carefully planned to ensure high performance. The onsite media center at the course required connectivity for over 2,000 daily unique clients.
With Meraki Wi-Fi as the first point of network access across the course, we were able to introduce a number of innovative features within our U.S. Open App and video boards to enhance the fan experience.” – Amanda Weiner, Senior Director, Digital Media, USGA
The visibility of the Meraki dashboard and simplicity of configuring Wi-Fi was critical in delivering the connected course. The team was able to detect hot zones, deploy and tune the entire network in under a week. New Wi-Fi 6 APs were installed to allow the high density merchandise pavilion on the course to transfer close to 3TB of data. To learn more, take a look at the on-demand webinar to understand their technology strategy, and learn how the Meraki Wi-Fi network helped deliver a connected fan experience. Watch now
The beginning of January brings a fresh sense of optimism, plenty of revelry, and a respite after the hectic holiday shopping season. But for the retail industry, that respite is short-lived: the start of a new retail year also means another National Retail Foundation (NRF) BIG Show.
Cisco Meraki has long had a presence at NRF, and this year, we’re bringing fun new people, exciting new sessions, and innovative new hardware to the Javits Center. Here’s the who, what, where, when, and why about Meraki at NRF 2019.
Who from Meraki will be at NRF 2019?
Meraki employees from a wide range of departments will be at the show hosting speaking sessions and engaging with people at the booth. Representatives from our product management, marketing, sales, and channel teams will all be there, ready to demo our latest and greatest and answer any questions you may have about Meraki.
What products will Meraki be showcasing?
Retailers love Meraki IT solutions because they’re straightforward to manage and have a wide range of capabilities to engage customers. This year, you’ll receive a firsthand look at the latest products from our core networking stack (wireless, switching, and security) as well as our SM endpoint management tool and MV smart cameras. Don’t miss the new MV12, MV22, and MV72, all of which were introduced in 2018 and are capable of advanced analytics, including motion heat maps and people detection.
Where can I find Meraki?
Meraki will be part of Cisco’s booth (#2254), a roomy 20 x 30-foot space. It’ll be easy to spot Meraki employees: we’ll all be wearing signature green Meraki t-shirts! Three screens in the booth will be dedicated to demos of the Meraki dashboard, and a few iPad Pros will also be strewn around the booth for mobile demos.
When is the Meraki “Big Ideas” speaking session?
You won’t want to leave NRF without having attended our “Big Ideas” session. This year, we’ll feature Marty Dempsey, VP of Global Retail at Estée Lauder Companies, a Meraki customer. In conversation with Imran Idrees, Portfolio Product Marketing Manager for Meraki, Dempsey will discuss how new digital technologies like mobile apps and cloud-based solutions are revolutionizing the traditional brick-and-mortar retail environment. Be sure to attend the session on January 14 at 1:30 PM right on the expo hall floor!
Another “Big Ideas” speaking session we’re proud to be a part of is CDW’s. George Bentinck, the product manager for Meraki MV smart cameras, will discuss how retailers can turn sight into insights and maximize the value of their investments in video security. You can learn more about our smart cameras on Tuesday, January 15 at 10:15 AM.
Why should retailers stop by our partner booths?
The Meraki party doesn’t stop as soon as you step out of Cisco’s booth. For the first time ever, six partner booths will play host to Meraki gear. Visit these featured partners, sprinkled around the show floor, to get a Meraki demo and enter a raffle to win a full stack of Meraki gear!
We can’t wait to see you from January 13-15, 2019. In the meantime, feel free to chat with us in the Meraki Community. See you in New York City!
Eileen Fisher’s strong commitments to female empowerment and sustainability set the high-end women’s apparel brand apart from others in the fashion space. Yet despite the uniqueness of its brand image, Eileen Fisher for a long time had to contend with many of the same issues that plague retailers everywhere: high network deployment costs, costly on-site management, and little to no visibility into disparate stores’ networks.
Nelson Diaz, Eileen Fisher’s Senior Manager of IT Infrastructure, had had enough. He sought to simplify network management in order to save time, money, and his team’s sanity. No longer did Diaz want to deal with unreliable off-the-shelf wireless or time-consuming troubleshooting tasks — he just wanted a network that worked.
“When it came to managing the previous infrastructure or pushing out firmware updates, we pretty much just crossed our fingers.” – Nelson Diaz, Sr. Manager IT Infrastructure
After evaluating a number of vendors that all promised to make things easier, Travis Laird, the lead architect for Eileen Fisher, suggested Diaz take a look at Meraki. Thanks to the simplicity of the Meraki dashboard, Eileen Fisher has increased visibility and control over their distributed retail stores in a way they had never had before.
Having implemented the new network in just a few months at all 70 store locations, Eileen Fisher was able to reduce its deployment costs by 40% and estimates that it will have saved 50% in WAN costs by the end of Q1 2019 with a full Meraki stack.
Watch the webinar recording to learn firsthand how Eileen Fisher was able to achieve these results with just a three person infrastructure team. Diaz and Laird discuss:
The network devices they’ve decided to deploy at every store
Their infrastructure plans to support growth, including an AWS migration
Their experience piloting and evaluating SD-WAN through the Meraki MX
How Eileen Fisher plans to leverage wireless solutions for marketing use cases
When Portland-based Stumptown Coffee Roasters needed a security camera and monitoring solution for their distributed and rapidly growing operation, they quickly settled on Meraki MV. Stumptown was already using Meraki wireless, switching, SD-WAN, and networking security solutions in their retail environments, so exploring security cameras was an easy decision for Travis Luckey, Stumptown’s former Director of Technology. With their core focus on product quality, Stumptown’s team found real value in having the ability to monitor remote sites and processes while also minimizing the need for onsite visits and troubleshooting. Their cafes and roasting facilities are scattered across the U.S., making centralized management, ease-of-use, and straightforward monitoring from any geographic location key features of the solution they would need.
Original Challenges
Stumptown’s headquarters are in Portland, along with some major operations facilities and cafes, but they also have facilities in New York City and Los Angeles, plus a distribution center in Seattle.
They needed a solution that would cut down on installation and configuration time while allowing the team to manage the entire operation from a centralized and/or remote location, if needed.
Luckey’s team loved the Meraki IT solution and wanted a camera solution with the same benefits.
The IT team wanted to be able to give different levels of camera access to various members of the executive, management, and respective operational teams.
Existing legacy systems were selected and installed ad hoc by local managers over many years, making it difficult to manage everything.
“Meraki cameras gave us the ability to deploy nationwide and centrally manage a single product platform for security footage.” – Travis Luckey, Director of Technology
An MV71 deployed at Stumptown’s Southeast Portland cafe and roastery location
The Deployment
The team installed over 50 indoor and outdoor Meraki cameras.
The company has standardized on Meraki cameras for their nationwide deployment.
MV cameras are used for both retail security as well as monitoring distribution centers (ten locations in total).
Anywhere from two to four cameras were installed at each site alongside a full stack of Meraki networking gear.
The IT team loved that there was no DVR infrastructure to install.
“[It’s so easy]…most junior level IT staff are able to do just about all of the configuration and management across our entire Meraki deployment.” – Travis Luckey, Director of Technology
Results
A small number of dedicated IT staff are able to monitor locations all around the country with minimal training time.
Installation is easy enough that the IT team can stage cameras and then ship them to a non-technical Operations Manager for installation, at which point the IT staff helps walk them through the physical deployment.
Both Tier 1 technical staff (IT, technical operations, systems administrators) and Tier 2 non-technical staff (Operations, Retail Managers, and company executives) are able to have differing levels of access to video pertinent to their respective roles.
During a footage recovery exercise following a bank robbery near a Stumptown location, administrators were able to pull video footage in a matter of minutes; the police officer told Travis this was one of the easiest footage recovery cases he had ever worked on.
The IT team now has full visibility into the full deployment from coast-to-coast and can troubleshoot any potential issues with cameras or the network before they grow into bigger business problems.
Firmware and security updates roll out seamlessly, with little to no effort required by Travis’s team.
Using Meraki cameras, plus the rest of the Meraki networking portfolio, has changed the Helpdesk staff’s roles dramatically. They spend significantly less time troubleshooting, and more time on new projects. The change has been so dramatic that they have changed their titles to IT Business Partners.
“It was really remarkable how easy it was to troubleshoot a potentially business-interrupting problem. I fell in love with the platform at the moment I realized that.” – Travis Luckey, Director of Technology
For many retailers, providing free guest Wi-Fi is no longer a perk; it’s a basic cost of doing business. Customers expect to be able to log on to free in-store Wi-Fi to surf on their smartphones and make video calls to their friends while they’re shopping. By now, most retailers have acquiesced to customer demand and installed high-speed wireless networks in their stores.
Although most retailers provide free Wi-Fi to their guests, many stores may not be leveraging this infrastructure to its fullest potential. Retailers should be taking advantage of the wireless infrastructure they’ve already invested in to learn more about their customers, modernize their stores, and provide first-class customer experiences.
1. Learn more about customers through location analytics
Today, nearly all shoppers are carrying smartphones while they roam around stores. In fact, a 2017 Deliotte report noted that 93% of U.S. smartphone owners use their phone while out shopping. This technology gives customers an unprecedented ability to look up anything and communicate with anyone. It can also help retailers with advanced wireless setups track how customers navigate within a store, and use this knowledge to merchandise as needed.
When a phone’s Wi-Fi radio is turned on, it sends out probes to wireless access points. This occurs whether the phone is actually connected to a Wi-Fi network or not, since smartphones are constantly hunting for new Wi-Fi networks to populate the list of available networks nearby. Using these probes as data points, wireless systems can triangulate shoppers’ locations within a few meters. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons — popularized as iBeacons by Apple — can take this even further and track shoppers to within inches of their locations. For instance, a home improvement retailer could know whether a customer is looking at sinks or at toilets based on their location.
Advanced systems, like Cisco Meraki Location Analytics, can present this precise location data in a number of ways benefitting retailers. For example, retailers can use location heat maps to see where their customers are walking within the store and appropriately arrange displays or staff certain areas based on actual customer engagement. Learn more about the possibilities of Location Analytics by reading this blog post.
2. Support more modern infrastructure
An upgraded wireless experience can serve as the catalyst for greater infrastructure updates that reduce cost and improve the customer experience. Two areas of technology that have seen rapid evolution in the last decade, and that matter a great deal in the retail space, are security cameras and mPOS (mobile point-of-sale). Incidentally, both IP cameras and mPOS rely on robust wireless deployments in the store.
Security cameras have gone from recording limited, grainy footage onto analog video management systems to recording high-definition video that can be streamed online from anywhere. As a result of these rapid technological advancements, retailers are increasingly adopting the newest camera models, which come fully equipped with wireless connectivity, to monitor in-store activity. These cameras, often deployed in places where Ethernet cords can’t easily reach, require a wireless network connection to send captured video to the server.
Similarly, most mPOS devices today don’t use Ethernet for connectivity, necessitating the use of a fast wireless network to process and complete transactions quickly. mPOS has burgeoned recently in large part thanks to the explosion of smartphones: companies like Square have modernized — and for some retailers, eradicated the need for — traditional cash registers.
Retailers with up-to-date, fully secure wireless networks are ready to support these technologies to the fullest extent.
3. Enable exceptional omnichannel experiences
As Amazon has shaken up the retail world over the last decade, omnichannel shopping experiences — experiences that are consistent whether a shopper is buying in-store or online — have become part of the retail zeitgeist. Delivering a comprehensive omnichannel experience requires retailers to collect and combine information about customers’ in-store and online shopping habits.
Retailers with robust wireless deployments are in a prime position to build a sophisticated system that helps them learn more about their customers’ shopping activities. Once a shopper logs on to a store’s Wi-Fi network, a whole host of possibilities opens up, especially if they’re already known (a repeat visitor) or their identity becomes known thanks to a splash page integration, like Facebook Login. From that point onward, customer activities that integrate with the network can be tracked and their experiences personalized.
For example, when a shopper who buys a pair of heels on a retailer’s website then wanders into that store’s dress aisle, she can be presented with an ad on her smartphone for a dress that matches the shoes. Additionally, based on the network bandwidth consumed by different mPOS terminals, stores can determine which checkout counters are the least or most popular and make staffing adjustments accordingly. Solutions that bring APIs into the mix can take this one step further by integrating activity on the network with retail loyalty programs or CRM systems. The possibilities are endless for IT administrators looking to build custom solutions that help retailers ensure consistent shopping experiences across channels.
To learn more about why Meraki is a great fit for retail, check out our retail webpage, read a customer case study, or sign up for our upcoming Meraki for Retail webinar on January 24, 2018 at 11 AM PT.
Retailers, get excited: NRF 2018: Retail’s BIG Show is coming up! In just a few days, the Javits Center in New York City will be abuzz with all things retail. Cisco Meraki will be at NRF to chat about our latest solutions, showcase a few of our customers, and discuss the benefits that cloud-managed IT can bring to retail. We’re really excited to share why cloud management and Meraki are a perfect fit for retail, and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve got in store (pun intended).
Which Meraki products will be showcased?
At NRF 2018, we’ll be showcasing the Meraki products that matter most to retailers. That means you’ll get to check out Meraki MR wireless access points and our newest product line, MV security cameras, in the flesh. Of course, come to our booth to watch a live demo of the Meraki dashboard and see how simple it is to manage and configure a full stack of IT infrastructure — including APs, switches, security appliances, cameras, phones, and enterprise mobility management — from a single place.
As a special treat, our team will set up beacons and Meraki APs throughout the expo hall to give attendees a first-hand look at how Meraki Location Analytics works in a retail environment. Come to the booth to check it out!
Where can I find Meraki?
Meraki will be part of Cisco’s booth (#2052), located on Level 3 of the Expo Hall. This large, 30 x 40-foot “toy box” will be an experiential retail environment where you’ll get to see a variety of Cisco technologies at play.
Here’s what the booth will look like — look for the big blue Cisco banner!
Which Meraki customers will I get to hear from?
Many retail companies have already deployed Meraki to great success, which is why we’re excited to feature some of them and have them discuss their Meraki deployments at NRF.
On Tuesday, January 16 from 10:15 AM to 11 AM, attend Meraki’s Exhibitor Big Ideas Session (Expo Hall, Room 4, Level 3). You’ll hear from Grupo Merza, a Mexican food and grocery distributor, about their deployment of 3,000 Meraki MV cameras.
Cisco will also be hosting speaking sessions with Dollar General and Panera Bread, both Meraki customers.
Who from Meraki will be at NRF 2018?
You’ll be able to meet some fantastic Meraki sales and marketing employees at NRF. We’ll have the product marketing leads for MV, MC, and our API solutions, as well as two people from the Meraki solutions architecture team, at the demo booth to chat about why Meraki is ideal for retailers.
For more than 20 years, Samuel Robinson has been managing the network for Goodwill Industries of South Florida. He and one other technician oversee voice, networking, and communication for a network that spans 46 stores, over 500 network devices and over 3,200 guests and employees on the network.
Goodwill Industries of South Florida Dashboard
During the majority of his time at Goodwill, they didn’t have any wireless solutions. “I just haven’t trusted wireless systems enough to set them up,” explained Robinson. That is, until Cisco Meraki came into the picture. Soutec, their partner, brought Meraki solutions and provided a full demo of the Meraki product suite, including the centralized dashboard.
From left to right: Zuo Wang, Engineer at Soutec, Pedro Colmenares, Account Executive at Soutec, Julian Pinzon, Managing Director at Soutec, Sam Robinson, IT Manager at Goodwill of South Florida.
Robinson was about to begin a major project to upgrade the network infrastructure at all 46 stores. The ease-of-use and quick deployment helped Robinson make an easy decision to go with Meraki.
Robinson started with MR access points to improve overall monitoring and management of in-store bandwidth usage. Goodwill has set up bandwidth limitations at download restraints to protect their network from employee misuse. By using MR traffic shaping rules, they are still able to provide internet access to guests that visit the stores. With those policies in place, Robinson can start to leverage other MR features like Location Analytics, which leverages built-in Bluetooth capabilities, to better understand guest and visitor behavior. This data can inform business decisions and help improve in-store processes.
After getting his feet wet with the APs, Soutec introduced Goodwill to the MX firewalls and MS switches. Now, almost every store is equipped with a full stack of Meraki gear.
Pictured on the left: Goodwill store equipment. Pictured on the right: Goodwill HQ equipment.
Having in-store internet is very important to Goodwill. The MX security appliances provide redundancy for their internet connection with the 4G cellular failover feature built into each device. This allows traffic to automatically redirect through a 3G/4G USB modem should the connectivity ever go down. With this, Goodwill is able to guarantee an internet source that keeps stores running.
Today, Goodwill Industries of South Florida has fully embraced Meraki MR, MS, and MX cloud-managed networking solutions at all stores and corporate offices. So what’s in store for the next deployment? Robinson is exploring the enterprise mobility management solution, Systems Manager, for in-store tablets and devices. Meraki solutions enable any retail organization to maintain a PCI compliant network and as a retail organization, that is essential for mobility and wireless management. With Systems Manager, Robinson can continue to be proactive and enforce security policies, application management, and more, to accelerate technology and innovation across Goodwill stores. And when questions arise, he reaches out to Soutec, who “seem as though they’re with Meraki. They’re like an extension of Meraki and help with any issues that come up.”
Read the full Goodwill of South Florida case study here.
The competition between brick-and-mortar shops and ecommerce retailers has never been fiercer. And to many observers, leading ecommerce companies like Amazon seem to have the upper hand: according to PwC, online retail sales grew over 10% in 2016, compared to just 1.4% for brick-and-mortar retail. But traditional retailers have a trick up their sleeve: experiential shopping, which turns physical shopping into an engaging experience that no online retailer can come close to emulating.
One of the best ways brick-and-mortar retailers can deliver a personalized, high-impact customer experience is through location analytics technologies. Retailers now have the power to combine Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and the Wi-Fi signals emanating from shoppers’ smartphones to understand customer behavior patterns, like where they are in the store and how long they’ve been there, and shape the shopping experience around these customers’ needs.
Here are just a few ways brick-and-mortar retailers can take advantage of location analytics to boost customer engagement.
1. Grab shoppers’ attention at just the right moment.
Blinkies
Remember those old coupon dispensers (affectionately referred to as “Blinkies”) that were in every aisle of most grocery stores in the ‘90s? Location analytics allows retailers of all types, grocery or otherwise, to grab shoppers’ attention just like these coupon dispensers once did.
Retailers that offer free guest Wi-Fi with BLE-enabled access points can push relevant display ads, notifications, and targeted coupons to customers’ smartphones at the right place and at the right time. For example, if a shopper has been lingering in the lipstick aisle of a beauty store, the retailer can push a “50% off the second lipstick” promotional coupon right to her smartphone, thereby increasing the likelihood of conversion.
It’s a win-win: the customer feels like she’s gotten something relevant and valuable, while the retailer can make more sales. Location analytics makes this all possible.
2. Optimize store layout in line with foot traffic trends.
Most retailers pay close attention to sales per square foot as a metric for how well they’re doing. Ensuring the layout of a store conforms to shoppers’ needs and expectations is key to maximizing this metric. However, for many retailers, store layout has often been more of an art than a science: what “feels right” over what actually is right. Location analytics changes the equation. Now shop owners can know precisely where shoppers are within the store and use this knowledge to put merchandise or in-store displays in the right place to maximize product exploration and purchase likelihood.
It all happens like magic: shoppers’ smartphones that have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled automatically send out probes and beacons that can communicate with access points and Bluetooth sensors. Through various mechanisms, these sensors can triangulate shoppers’ locations within the store. Over time, store owners can see a visual map of where customers are (and aren’t) going within the store.
A location heat map, with foot traffic and Wi-Fi access points mapped.
Interestingly, grocery stores have designed their store layouts in a very specific way to increase how long shoppers spend in-store, as well as average basket size. Location analytics lets businesses of all types do this in a data-driven manner. As an example, a home improvement store like Orchard Supply Hardware (OSH) could glean information from location heat maps that customers don’t linger near the paint section for long. The store owner could then decide to locate the paint near a more heavily trafficked area — say, the hardware area — or to increase the visibility of signage pointing to the paint aisle.
3. Always put the best message out there.
The era of mass advertising has largely given way to more targeted, personalized messaging appropriate for consumers at different stages of their buying journey and with different needs. It’s imperative that retailers adapt to this new reality — that they learn more about their customers in order to specifically tailor messages for their audiences. Location analytics can help by tracking customer behavior both inside and outside the store.
In-store, location-based data can be used to track how often customers visit (and return) to stores, and for how long. Imagine how valuable it would be to know not only when people visit — information that’s available simply through observation — but also why they’re coming back (is a new promotion working?), how often they come back (are these frequent shoppers or sporadic visitors?) and how long they linger inside the store. Once customers connect to the store’s Wi-Fi network, stores can track visitors each time they come back. This information can be linked to loyalty programs to provide even deeper insight into customers’ behavior.
Even when customers aren’t in the store, companies that utilize Facebook login as an authentication tool can get a host of anonymized customer demographic information, such as age, gender, education, workplace, and more. This information can automatically be aggregated and organized to give store owners valuable insight into who their customers are.
Conclusion
Brick-and-mortar stores can and should leverage every resource possible to create personalized customer experiences. Location analytics can help physical retailers learn more about their customers, just like their online counterparts, thereby making the physical shopping experience more engaging and high-touch.
All Cisco Meraki access points come with integrated BLE radios. Combined with the location analytics capabilities built into the Meraki dashboard, retailers that deploy Meraki in-store can learn more about their customers and use this knowledge to elevate the shopping experience.
To learn more about how Meraki location analytics can help boost your customer engagement and sales, download the solution guide, Location Analytics for Retailers.
When Stephen Stanton, VP of IT at A Wireless, was told about upcoming plans to acquire 370 stores across the United States, he didn’t think it would be possible. Stanton knew the company would not be able to scale at that rate with their legacy networking solution. But that was four years ago. Today, A Wireless, a full-service Authorized Verizon Retailer, has about 1,170 stores across 46 states—an almost tenfold increase in store locations.
On Thursday, February 9th at 10 AM PT, Stanton will join us in a live conversation to share how A Wireless evaluated and decided on Cisco Meraki as their solution of choice for national expansion.
As A Wireless acquired new stores, they also acquired a mix of IT networking solutions and vendor products. They found themselves with a network built on varying technologies, configurations, and management systems. Implementing a standardized network and centralized management was essential for their continued success.
Over a 3-year period, A Wireless have saved in excess of 80% in the total cost of ownership of the network, compared to a more traditional networking solution.
A Wireless TCO Cost Savings
Over 670 stores already fitted with a full suite of Meraki solutions, including MX Security Appliances, MR Access Points, MS Switches, and even a few MC Phones. Now, Stanton and his team are ready to deploy the next 500 locations with the same products and by the final deployment, all 1,170 stores will be full Meraki shops without any other network vendor solutions.
View a recording of this webinar, A Wireless, A Verizon Premium Retailer: Scaling Nationally with Meraki, here: [Link]
Meraki’s CMX presence API enables organizations to extend the functionality offered by Meraki location analytics. In this mini-series of blog posts, we explore the capabilities of some of our technology partners that integrate with the API. In our previous spotlight we covered Euclid Analytics and their capabilities with Meraki WLAN devices. In this blog post we take a look at Turnstyle.
Turnstyle’s WiFi marketing platform offers customer engagement, loyalty, and analytics capabilities that enable retailers to learn actionable insights about on-premise customers. This can be used to send real-time messages, coupons, and rewards directly to customers’ smartphones, without the need for a mobile app; thereby increasing customer engagement and loyalty.
Customer case study
A restaurant chain deployed Meraki with Turnstyle integration in 54 locations to learn about customer trends, to generate marketing lists, and to create a location-based marketing platform. This was then used to reward customers for their loyalty in an effort to increase visit frequency, and to re-engage with customers who had not visited for over a month.
Over four months, the restaurant chain generated over 12,000 customer opt-ins for marketing communications via email, SMS, and Facebook. Over 30% of the client’s marketing communications were read by its customers, and ~18% of all coupons delivered through the Turnstyle platform were redeemed. The contextual messaging had a dramatic impact on customer loyalty and visit frequency, which increased by 70% and resulted in an ROI of over 15x.
The Turnstyle platform
Turnstyle’s platform consists of three components that integrate into a Meraki WLAN network:
Audience Insights uses Meraki wireless APs to passively monitor customer foot traffic and trends. This information can be used to make operational decisions on things such as staffing schedules, marketing strategies, and customer rewards.
Social WiFi gives business owners the ability to offer customers a gated WiFi network, eliminating the need for cumbersome passwords. Meraki offers extremely simple out of the box integration with Facebook WiFi, but for customers needing Facebook, Google, Twitter, and email simultaneously, Turnstyle Social WiFi offers a solution.
Engagement provides business owners with the ability to set up location-based messaging to interact with customers in hyper-contextual ways. Turnstyle makes it easy to reward customers for their loyalty by enabling coupons to be sent based on visit frequency, or to help businesses re-engage with customers who haven’t visited a venue within a defined time-period. With all Meraki WLAN devices connected to a single cloud infrastructure, this engagement can stretch globally wherever you have a Meraki device.
What’s next?
Meraki wireless customers can sign up for Turnstyle by visiting this page. No additional hardware is required, and you can be up and running in less than 10 minutes. Cisco Meraki’s CMX location analytics is available today for all customers, with bespoke functionality enabled by the API and our technology partners. Visit our documentation portal for further information on CMX analytics and our API.
