Xpertek Contact, the customer experience management division of the Xpertek Group, has partnered with Canadian-based Turnstyle Solutions to unveil Turnstyle's cloud-based solution and products in southern Africa.
Turnstyle develops a range of social WiFi, location-based marketing, reporting and analytics solutions for the offline retail market, designed to automate customer interactions and marketing campaigns through value-added in-store services.
According to Xpertek Contact MD Chris Cochrane, the partnership will appeal to retailers looking to leverage their investment in free WiFi services for in-store customers, combining Xpertek's local market knowledge with Turnstyle's proven technology.
"The deployment and expansion of WiFi networks in South Africa is at an all-time high," says Cochrane. "That said, free WiFi providers are struggling to monetise their service and achieve a measurable return on investment.
"Working with Turnstyle, we can offer our customers an immediate and effective solution to this challenge, which, when combined with our own existing customer touch point solutions, enhance the customer experience while generating valuable and actionable marketing data for retailers."
Tracking foot traffic
In an interview with ITWeb, Cochrane mentioned that the solution brings the concept of cookies to the real world, which will allow retailers to provide more targeted and relevant offers to their customers.
"Along with this, it allows retailers to track foot traffic in and around their stores, allowing them to answer questions such us: 'How many people walk past my store and don't enter it?
What is the average dwell time of customers to my store? How many new versus repeat customers did we get in any period?'"
He also pointed out that a key differentiator for Turnstyle is that the solution is hardware-agnostic and can work with any existing WiFi infrastructure that a retailer may have.
This is achieved by providing the retailer with a wireless access point that can plug into any existing wireless router, he explained, adding that many similar solutions only work with specific hardware suppliers, meaning that retailers may need to go through the costly exercise of changing their WiFi infrastructure in order to reap the benefits of a solution like Turnstyle.
Turnstyle CEO and founder Devon Wright says Xpertek is the ideal partner to bring the Turnstyle brand and solutions to the southern African market.
"We were struck by Xpertek's insightful industry knowledge of the local market," notes Wright.
"Our mission is to give customers the experience they deserve while providing retailers with a comprehensive view of how their customers engage their services online and in-store. Our success, therefore, greatly depends on understanding retail and customer dynamics in the regions we operate in, so having a partner like Xpertek openly share its market knowledge and impressive go-to-market models was a critical step to doing business here."
Great expectations
According to Cochrane, customers tend to expect free WiFi when they visit certain retail establishments.
"As it stands, providing this service does little more than add to the cost of doing business. Using Turnstyle's public WiFi software-as-a-service solution, however, we can now tie in WiFi access with customers' social media portals (such as Facebook and Twitter), giving our retail customers a means of gathering valuable marketing information with consent."
In doing so, Cochrane adds, retailers can tie in their WiFi services to a customer's physical location, allowing them to, for example, generate customer contact lists for marketing purposes, automatically post social media 'check-ins' to increase brand presence, and recommend products and promotions based on the customer's online behaviour.
"The rapid expansion of smart device use in the region has resulted in an exponential increase in demand for anywhere, anytime WiFi access. This, in turn, creates opportunities for smart retailers to take advantage of social WiFi, location-based marketing and presence analytics solutions to markedly improve their competitive advantage and brand appeal," concludes Cochrane.
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