In-store Wi-Fi is likely to be part of the pre-holiday checklist for many retailers as the year’s biggest selling season approaches. Businesses are learning that they can use Wi-Fi to push targeted offers to shoppers, but in order to do that they need to get customers to connect to their networks and share some personal information. Cisco thinks it has found a way to get consumers to do both of these things.
Cisco, which owns Wi-Fi access point maker Meraki, has partnered with Facebook in an effort to offer businesses a new way to monetize Wi-Fi. When consumers access Facebook on a mobile device at a participating business, they see a Facebook check-in page which gives them the option to access the venue’s Wi-Fi network. Accessing the network redirects the user to the venue’s Facebook landing page. It also sends information about the individual to the business, including age, gender, city of origin, likes, dislikes, and language. Facebook does not send the business the individual’s identity.
Businesses can use the personal information to make offers to the shopper and can aggregate the information to learn more about their customer base as a whole. “Wi-Fi is quickly becoming the most effective way for companies to connect with their customers on mobile devices in real-time,” said Sujai Hajela, vice president and general manager, enterprise networking. “Leveraging the online and onsite data collected about consumers who opt-in is top of mind for many CEOs, CIOs, CMOs.”
But sharing information with the businesses they patronize is usually not top of mind for consumers, and some may balk at the idea. Retail giant Nordstrom learned the hard way that shoppers are not always comfortable with sharing information through Wi-Fi. Earlier this year, it told shoppers it was using its Wi-Fi network to track their movements in stores in order to learn about browsing and shopping patterns. Customer complaints subsequently prompted Nordstrom to discontinue its Wi-Fi tracking.
Legal experts say businesses do not break any laws when they track customers inside their stores, and many retailers are hoping that consumers will come to see sharing information over Wi-Fi as something akin to allowing web browsers to set cookies to learn about online browsing and shopping behaviors. Cisco’s partnership with Facebook, called CMX for Facebook Wi-Fi, invites users to join a network before using Wi-Fi to gather information, so it is less covert than Nordstrom’s Wi-Fi experiment. It also makes offers within the Facebook environment, which is one in which users expect to be recognized.
“This is a continuation of what I call our ‘detect, connect, engage’ vision, kind of a vision of reducing the friction of engagement for businesses,” said Bob Friday, CTO of Cisco’s wireless networking business unit. “As we mobilize the Internet and move through this innovation cycle, Wi-Fi is becoming this base access technology,” he said. “We see that about 70% of all data traffic is going to be moving through some sort of Wi-Fi network by 2017.”
CMX for Facebook Wi-Fi uses a software connector on the company’s ISR G2 or ASR 1000 router with either UCS blades or the company’s mobility services engine to enable users to connect to the Wi-Fi network and automatically “check-in” to the venue’s Facebook profile. The solution is in trials now with a limited number of retail partners.
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Image: Courtesy of tabtimes.com
