Over the past decade, the technology sector 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 of location aware services that allow for innovations, the steady increase in customer engagement, and the overall boost of productivity. 

How location-based services 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

• Security, 
• Communication, 
• Customer engagement, 
• Marketing, 
• Operations. 

The benefits of location-based services for businesses and organizations

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 COVID19. 

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. 

The different types of location-based services

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

WiFi

WiFi 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. WiFi 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 [H3]

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.

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.

Are location-based tools right for your business?

As demonstrated, 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 we come 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 solutions 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. Join our newsletter to stay up to day with the future releases on our blog, and never miss an update on the current trends and innovations in the location-aware world.