As a business owner, you always want to think of ways that you can improve, innovate and get ahead. With the new digital world, it is imperative to keep up with the latest developments in technology. One of the ways businesses are creating better customer experiences and workflows is by using indoor positioning technologies.
Indoor Positioning for Improved Customer Experience
To understand the uses of indoor positioning solutions for different industries, we must look at the businesses’ goals. If the primary goal of the Business is to elevate its customer experience, one way this can be achieved is by implementing an indoor positioning system. For example, if you own a hospital, the building is likely a large, multi-floor, and has multiple buildings. The patient experience is already stressful as people come in feeling unwell.
Additional stress is inflicted on the patient when they arrive at the hospital and have trouble navigating to their appointment. Sometimes there is a help desk, but often there are not enough resources or time to spend escorting everyone to their appointments or clinics. However, a hospital that has deployed an indoor positioning system (IPS) can avoid this stress and optimize the patient experience.
How an Indoor Positioning System is Deployed
Installing an indoor positioning system is a smart move that a hospital can take to increase patient satisfaction and care. To deploy an IPS begins with a reputable company with experience with location-based technologies. The company that deploys the IPS will first calibrate the entire building and its complexities, including floors, staircases, elevators, escalators, etc. until a digital map is rendered of the entire property.
The company will create a digital map of your hospital that will generally include features such as search, suggested search, and navigation. Once the digital map has been uploaded onto your hospital’s website, kiosks, or management platform, patients can access it by downloading your hospital app or through a QR code that they can scan with their smart device.
The Benefits of Deploying IPS for Customer Experience
Now that we’ve read how a business can implement an indoor positioning system in their building and how the customer, visitor, patient, etc., can use it, we can understand the alleviations this may bring. With an IPS in place, visitors can arrive in an unfamiliar location and feel confident about where they need to go. By downloading a digital map, visitors can search for their doctor’s offices and receive turn-by-turn directions. This simple solution can increase the customer satisfaction of your business tenfold. Since customer experience is vital to the success of any business, it is a great idea to start thinking about whether your building could benefit from using an IPS.
Multiple-Use Cases for IPS
No matter the Business vertical, there are multiple applications of indoor positioning. Using indoor positioning to help customers with wayfinding is just one of the many ways this technology can be used. If you have an IPS that is working alongside a notification software platform, you can combine the functionality of both. Let’s take a look at a University Campus, for example. A University generally has multiple buildings spanning acres of land. With the number of students, staff, and workers who visit the campus daily, it is good to have an IPS to help streamline the faculty duties on campus.
By digitally rendering a campus map, faculty can integrate the maps with enterprise software, allowing them to draw location analytics and data from the area. This real-time data helps determine the traffic flow of certain buildings, parking lots, and classrooms. This data can be distributed meaningfully to people on campus to notify them of total parking lots, maximum capacity areas, and even information regarding lecture or class changes.
Notifying External Workers of Maintenance Issues
Like sending notifications to people across campus, an indoor positioning system coupled with a notification system allows you to pinpoint areas on the campus that need maintenance or construction and send directions to the exact location for external workers. This process eliminates the need for a faculty member to meet the worker and guide them to the location to be maintained. Workers can even fill out their security information to enter the building through the same platform. This saves a lot of time and resources for the faculty team.
Quicker Evacuation Management
In times of emergency, it is essential that your business is well prepared and can act quickly to get everyone in the building to safety. With an indoor positioning system, you can easily create evacuation plans and run drills to see how teams and staff perform in these situations allowing you to gain insights and improve your evacuation plan. Once the details are ironed out, it is possible to create emergency response plans and save them according to each emergency event. Directions to the nearest emergency exits or safe zone can be alerted to everyone on the property directly to their smartphones.
Find Important Equipment Faster
With an indoor positioning system, you can have a digital view of all the hydrants and extinguishers that can help with the response time of a firefighting team that has been called to extinguish a fire. Other major equipment areas can be added to your map and be found in similar situations, such as your building’s HVAC system. Easily share and send directions to maintenance workers or emergency responders.
Does your Business need IPS?
After reading this article, you should understand just how important an IPS can be for business processes. It can help in more ways than just wayfinding for customers and add immense value to your daily operations. If you are a business considering IPS, it is good to look into some different Location Based Indoor Positioning Solutions to see which one is your best fit. Suppose you can find a company with little to no external hardware to provide accurate positioning. In that case, this can potentially save you a lot of money by reducing upfront costs and maintenance fees. It is also good to look for a company that will create your digital maps with unlimited points of interest because this can add up.
Navigation options should be seamless and compatible across web, mobile, and kiosks if your Business needs them. This allows for accessible navigation for all visitors to the property. Advanced search options will reduce people’s time looking for areas of interest on your property. Turn-by-turn directions with blue-dot navigation will give your visitors an intuitive sense of direction.
Suppose you commonly have a lot of visitors and no way to actively manage traffic flow, help people get where they want to go efficiently and are looking for a way to streamline your management duties. In that case, an IPS is a no-brainer for your Business.
