Guest Wi-Fi has become a must-have,not a nice-to-have requirement for our customers. Today, let's talk about building customer engagement through guest Wi-Fi and how CMX Connect creates anewguest Wi-Fi experience. We also have a special offer to share if you're interested in trying outCMX (Connected Mobile Experiences) Connect.
Have you ever found yourself constantly checking emails on your phone, whether you are in the supermarket, a sport stadium or your doctor's office? We live in a connected world so when people lose their Internet connectivity, they feel as uncomfortable as if they are walking in the dark. According to a Cisco report [1], one in every three college students and young professionals believes the Internet is as important as air, water, food, and shelter. At college games, fans often leave at half time if they cannot connect to the Internet to post photos or tweet comments [2]. Offering guest Wi-Fi has become a must, not an option, for most of our customers across all verticals such as retail, healthcare, sports and entertainments, and education.
So you've decided to offer guest Wi-Fi at your venue, but how do you make the most of it from a business standpoint? According to a Hotels.com 2013 survey, the first thing hotel guests try is the quality of guest Wi-Fi, before the quality breakfast or even the comfortable bed [3]. So guest Wi-Fi is a perfect opportunity for you to engage your visitors and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. With a seamless one-click mobile-first onboarding experience, visitors can check-in on your business Facebook page, or provide email information for future promotional campaign. Since you also know the context and location of your visitors, you can offer personalized and relevant information to visitors. For example, first-time parents connect to the hospital's guest Wi-Fi in the Maternity ward can be served a video on changing a newborn's diaper .
We have made significant improvements in the CMX 10.1 release and will continue to partner with our customers in this journey. So how does CMX Connect help you improve your business?
Figure 1.Example of the portal builder tool.
Figure 2.Example of custom guest portals
Some marketing managers prefer using the Facebook page as the landing page. Our partnership with Facebook allows visitors to check-in to the Facebook page before joining the Wi-Fi network. Figure 3is an example of the guest experience using Facebook check-in.
Figure 3.Example of Facebook Wi-Fi experience
Whether customers want to build a custom portal or link to a Facebook page, it's just a matter of a few clicks on an intuitive user interface.
Figure 4-CMX Connect Experience Dashboard, where admin could manage the onboarding experience for different location.
Recognizing how important it is for our customers to provide great Guest Wi-Fi onboarding and engaging experience for their visitors, we have decided to move the CMX Connect license from the Advance license to the Base license.
CMX 10.1 comes with free evaluation licenses for all APs for the first 120 days so you can give CMX Connect a try at no charge during this duration if you deploy it in your network. To make it even easier for you, we will offer CMX on the cloud beta program for the first 30 customers who sign up. In this program, we will install CMX Connect on Cisco Cloud Services. All you would need to do is to point your controllers to our cloud instance and you can enjoy the service for free for the first two months. Please email me at [email protected] if you'd like to learn more about the product or would like to take advantage of this offer.
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