Location Aware Technologies & How Organizations Benefit

Over the past decade, the location aware technologies has rapidly transformed, providing businesses and organizations with new, highly effective ways of engaging with their customers.

One of the technological developments that have benefited businesses the most is the evolution in the location aware services that allow for innovations, the steady increase in customer engagement, and the overall boost of productivity. The recent flourishing use of smartphones, tablets, cellular networks and Wi-Fi has made location awareness technology accessible to just about everyone.

What is Location-Based Technology?

Location-based services use real-time geographic locations from mobile devices to provide information for entertainment or security. These services allow you to check-in at place or events. They use the GPS technology on your phone to track your location. You do have to allow the services to track your location. If you opt out of the service, then you will not have this capability.

How Location-Based Technology Work?

Location-based applications and services use various devices, tags, and sensors to create a digital trail about what is happening at a physical location, providing a significant analytical value to those organizations.

Today, location aware services are used in a range of industries including hospitality, education, healthcare, security, finance, retail, and more. Analytical tools provide businesses with granular and detailed data on their customers, precise enough to identify who visits a particular physical location owned by a business, what paths they choose, or how long they usually stay.

Location aware information offers businesses and other entities critical insights related to consumer activity, their preferences or habits, and can enhance various business processes including:

Today, location aware services are used in a range of industries including hospitality, education, healthcare, security, finance, retail, and more. Analytical tools provide businesses with granular and detailed data on their customers, precise enough to identify who visits a particular physical location owned by a business, what paths they choose, or how long they usually stay.

Location aware information offers businesses and other entities critical insights related to consumer activity, their preferences or habits, and can enhance various business processes including:

• Security
• Communication
• Customer Engagement
• Marketing
• Operations

Improving customer engagement with location-aware advertising

Imagine a holiday resort that attracts hundreds of vacationers monthly. The owners could use location-based services to analyze how visitors move through their space both outdoors and indoors, and identify what items or parts of the resort interest them the most. This allows for optimizing not only their physical spaces like the hotel, spa, restaurant, bar, or pool areas to boost customer engagement and sales, but also creating highly personalized campaigns based on customers’ preferences and choices.

Any holiday resort that manages a physical space and outdoor lands can use location-based marketing tools to target ads to people who are in the same geographic location as their business. By harnessing the power of location intelligent software, marketers can easily engage with vacationers sending them personalized notifications, promotions, offers, or inform them about any other events that require their immediate attention like health and safety alerts related to COVID-19.

Enhancing online booking systems thanks to location awareness

Location-based services can also enable online appointment booking solutions for physical businesses and organizations. Utilizing geographical data, online scheduling software allows consumers view waiting times and available appointments in real-time, as well as see the estimated journey time – all useful features for accessing a range of services including healthcare services, hairdresser, spa centres, beauty salons, and more.

Location-based products are powered by a number of location-aware mechanisms and technologies. See the most important ones outlined below:

• Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is a location-aware technology, particularly useful in indoor settings where GPS signal is weaker. If you are a business owner, you can offer customers access to a free guest WiFi, and once they log on, you can monitor their location and movements within your store and surrounding areas. Wi-Fi is one of the most popular technologies starter technologies because the base infrastructure is already present at most businesses.

• Bluetooth

Bluetooth is commonly used by businesses to manage and monitor location and distance between people – e.g. consumers and employees within the facility to ensure proper social distancing requirements are being met. This is one of the most effective solutions for contact tracing, particularly for large venues that use wearable technologies or tags. Additionally, Bluetooth has a wide variety of form factors to meet customer needs and is native in all smartphones.

• Digital Fingerprinting

Digital Fingerprinting is considered one of the most accurate location aware technologies. This maps out various signals that smartphone sensors can utilize and pinpoints the location of a smartphone whether indoor or outdoor, enabling a seamless experience.

• RFID

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology utilizes small chips or tags attached to a specific object to enable location tracking. Information on the items are electronically stored within the chips. RFID technology is commonly used to enable asset tracking – for example items such as clothing, both in-store and in warehouses.

• Ultrawide Band (UWB)

Ultra Wideband is a radio technology that uses a very low energy level for communication which results in highly accurate tracking. Many new smartphones include UWB chips inside, making UWB a technology that is certain to shake up the industry.

Agreefy is a solution that helps you gather valuable insights on what is happening in the physical world.

Agreefy equips you with location-aware tools which allow you to understand and influence on-site movements, and thus increase your key business indicators, revenue, and profits. Using Agreefy, you can be rest assured that you will be spending time and money on what matters most, while we enable your success.

Location-based services can be inherently valuable to businesses of various types and sizes. However, not all companies have the capacity to develop their own proprietary software, as this can be an expensive, time consuming and resource-intensive process.

This is where Agreefy comes in. Agreefy’s team has developed location-based solutions that your business can use to enhance customer engagement and operations in your indoor or outdoor space, while saving time and money.

Agreefy’s solution for Businesses allow for:

• Managing relevant assets and items.
• Monitoring and managing crowds and in-store foot traffic in your indoor and outdoor locations.
• Managing and tracking online bookings and appointments.
• Accessing customer journey analytics (such as in-store traffic analytics) and location-based marketing tools so you can better communicate with your customers via email, text, and push notifications.
• Making your services future proof, mixing and matching technologies that are right for you. If a new one comes along, it will integrate right alongside your existing selection.

Innovative location-based services allow you to track, analyze, and understand the movements of relevant individuals and assets, and use this knowledge to manage in-store crowds, understand customer behaviors, and deploy targeted location-based marketing campaigns to individuals who have visited your space.

Location Aware Technologies in the Education Sector

Agreefy offers location aware solutions that can help your school understand the movements of students, visitors, and assets. Whether you are concerned about improving safety or making asset management more efficient, Agreefy can bolster your efforts.

Student Management

With Agreefy’s Enhanced Education Module, you can monitor the location and movements of your students and ensure that they are secure. Using either location-enabled student IDs or wearable technologies, our products allow you to monitor the location of your students while they are under school supervision. Whether students are on the bus, in or between classes, or exploring their surroundings on daily field trips, we are here to ensure that they remain safe and secure each and every day.

Asset Management

Asset management can be challenging, especially when you are dealing with assets distributed across education campuses. With our Asset Tracking Module, you can control your assets effectively, reducing loss and optimizing utilization.

Agreefy’s solutions are unique in that our proprietary platform is technology agnostic so we can mix and match technologies, while future proofing deployments. As a result, you can optimize costs, accuracy, battery life and other factors in order to ensure different types of assets can utilize different technology while not only in the same system, but also integrating your work and information flows through our Asset Lifetime Management module.

With Agreefy, you can satisfy the needs of administrators, asset managers, and auditors. We offer easy to use tracking, issuance/collection, reporting and audit functions that allow you to view and track your assets and inventory in real time, understand their value and depreciation impacts, and generate reports based on self-defined rules.

Visitor Management

One of the biggest challenges with child safety is visitor management. As an educational institution, knowing who your visitors are is both insightful and critical for safety and operational needs.

Using our solutions, we can directly integrate your infrastructure into a Visitor Management tool allowing for signup onsite via WiFi, on your website, or in advance via a form you may have linked. This will allow you to monitor who is entering and leaving your school, and prepare for important meetings by generating ID cards for forthcoming visitors. Our Visitor Management tools also include rescheduling, notification, and staff allocation features, which your team members can utilize whenever needed.

Retail Sector use case for Location Aware Technologies

Agreefy’s tools are designed with the needs of malls and retail stores in mind. Owners and management teams can stay informed about what’s happening at their physical facilities, understand and aid the movement of people and increase customer engagement in shopping centers.

Customer Journey Mapping and Location Analytics

Agreefy’s multi-tenancy solution helps bridge the gap between the online and offline world by bringing big data and analytics to understand and influence customer behaviors within shopping malls. Understanding what paths customers take and which stores they are visiting can help ensure consistent and increased foot traffic to your location. In addition, for large malls we can provide indoor navigation solutions to help your customers find what they need and get there quickly.

We enable malls to not only understand its visitors better but also for them to re-sell relevant information to specific stores such as how many people pass by its doors, how many enter, and how long they dwell there. Advanced location analytics to understand their paths can help stores understand what other stores on site are visited by its typical customer and provide a platform to help stores understand what is working and what is not to increase their sales and provide customers with a better experience at the same time.

Engagement and Marketing

Agreefy for shopping centres and malls introduces a customer CRM where business owners and managers can access data on their visitors in order to re-engage with them with custom notifications or personalized marketing communication. Our Health & Safety feature allows you to notify visitors of the malls if there are any safety or health concerns that have emerged within your facility.

Your marketing department can make use of the valuable data we provide you related to your shopping centres’ visitors, including demographic, path, and behavioral data including in-store retail analytics. Using these insights, your team can build, and execute on highly-personalized marketing campaigns.

Agreefy also allows you to link relevant loyalty programs, promotions, email marketing campaigns, surveys, push notifications, and more – based consumer actions taken within your facility. All information can be easily shared within your teams and facilities across organizations, ensuring steady information flows, and a high-accuracy of data. Custom insights and reports are available anytime within a dedicated dashboard that can be customized for at the store level to separate access levels for tenants.

Visitor Health and Safety

With Agreefy, compliance with health and safety requirements is easy and effortless. First, thanks to location-based technologies, you gain access to offline customer CRM, knowing who visited your mall or ensuring capacity restrictions that may be enforced by local regulations to allow for a positive shopping experience even in times of increasing regulations.

This location-aware approach allows for quick and easy visitors registration, reporting of sickness, and automatic notifying any of your clients in the case of a health or safety event and any other unforeseen circumstances.

Lastly, Agreefy’s solution allows you to pinpoint the location of your security to ensure proper walks are being done and to reallocate security to areas with higher crowd density to mitigate any issues before they occur. Better match risk with capabilities to keep your customers safe and secure no matter what the daily activity would be.

Online Appointment and Booking

Simple and easy to use online appointment booking software and virtual queuing is a must-have for any store that operates with crowds or wants to adhere to density regulations. to help increase efficiency, create customer satisfaction, and provide the safest possible environment.

Using our appointment booking software ensure customers confirm appointments for any service based stores within your mall allowing customers to more freely spend their time throughout the mall instead of waiting in one place. In addition, being to take a virtual number allows “walk-in” customers to avoid waiting in a line and they will have information about their status at their fingertips.

Our appointment booking and queue management software can help you adapt to the new digital environment and manage increased demand more safely and efficiently.

Learn More about Agreefy Solution Portfolio here

To know more about how Agreefy can be beneficial for your business, get in touch with us. We would be glad to provide a free demo of the solution.

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