High-speed, reliable WiFi is no longer optional for many businesses. If you run a café, pub, or hotel and can’t offer your customers a WiFi connection they can rely on, they will quickly flock to your competitors instead. However, with one or more WiFi hotspots, you could transform the wireless connection at your business or venue into a service which generates revenue, attracts more customers, and a promotional tool.
Why Should UK Businesses Care About Hotspots & How Can They Help Reduce Common Wifi Problems?
Many businesses start off just using a home WiFi connection and router to run their business. While this might be fine if you only have one or two devices connected, once you have 30 customers all trying to connect to your WiFi at the same time, you’ll find that you get a lot of problems with slow speeds or weak signal. WiFi hotspots can help remedy this.
A WiFi hotspot isn’t just an added bonus though, it can also form a key part of your revenue generation and marketing efforts. When you get a WiFi hotspot from a provider like us, you can choose to make it a paid, free, or time limited WiFi connection. Some businesses may wish to charge their customers extra to use the WiFi or offer a set amount of free browsing before the user needs to pay for more.
The login page for the WiFi connection is also fully customisable. You can use the available space to display products, offers, discounts, menus, or any other info you like. Given that users have view this page in order to log in, you have a captive market for any message you want to display.
What Is WiFi Hotspotting?
The hardware behind a “hotspot” is called an Access Point. These access points are connected to a wired internet connections and generate a wireless field in their surroundings. Depending on the size of your premises you might need more than one access point to get complete coverage, however these multiple access points are still part of the same wireless network. Customer and staff devices will automatically switch between the different WiFi fields as they move through your venue.
The hotspots join with your existing internet connection, so there’s no need to lay new telephone lines or broadband cable, just a single ethernet cable from your router to each access point.
At Carden Hotspots, we also supply high-quality, industry-leading access points to provide our customers with reliable WiFi hotspots. We can also provide IP65-rated waterproof access points to extend your WiFi signal outside, perfect for smoking areas, balconies, and gardens.
So, how can your business use WiFi hotspotting to increase its profits?
7 Reasons Why UK Businesses Should Use WiFi Hotspots
If you are in the UK, WiFi hotspotting is great for small businesses and start-ups to expand their reach and engage with customers. Every business can use their new WiFi hotspot however they wish, but here are seven ways that Carden Hotspots’ customers have benefited from a managed WiFi hotspot.
- Increase Productivity
Reliable WiFi isn’t simply great for customers, it’s great for staff too. Having reliable WiFi over an entire premise makes it easier for employees to communicate and collaborate. For example, some hotels have now switched their room service to an app-driven experience using in-room iPads because they can now rely on each room having consistent, high-speed WiFI.
- To Enable BYOD And Telecommuting
Even non-customer facing businesses like offices have benefited from WiFi hotspots, enabling them to implement Bring Your Own Device environments where employees can bring their own laptops and mobiles and connect directly to their nearest hotspot when they arrive at work.
- Improved Security
WiFi hotspot network can be kept entirely separate from your back-office internet connection. This protects your sensitive data from being access by your customers and protects your customers’ data from being accessed by you.
- Customer Satisfaction
Customers want free WiFi and one only needs to look at the TripAdvisor reviews of any hotel without WiFi to see how much it can affect customer satisfaction. If your customers are satisfied, they are more likely to return and to recommend your business to others.
- Higher Value Per Customer
WiFi encourages customers to stay longer. If a customer can stay for hours and work on their laptop, they are more likely to buy more food and beverage while they are there.
- New Ways To Collect Data
Monitoring the data from your managed WiFi hotspot can give you new insights about your customers, what times of day you are busiest, which devices your customers are using, how long is each customer spending online. This data can help influence other business decisions like staffing levels and marketing choices.
- Improving Competitiveness
By far the most important reason to have reliable customer WiFi in your business is a simple one – your competitors already have one. If there are two cafes on the same street and only one offers WiFi, which one do you think will be more successful?
Need A Managed WiFi Hotspot For Your Business?
A managed WiFi hotspot can supply a personalised, yet professional approach to serving potential customers. Our team is here to help make setting up and managing your WiFi hotspot easy. You can call today and book a free site survey. One of our engineers will conduct an initial survey of your premises and do several signal strength tests at different locations. This will help us figure out how many access points would be needed in order to give your whole premises a consistent high-speed WiFi signal.
If you run a Hotel, B&B, Café, Pub, Club, Venue, or conference centre – you need reliable WiFi. Call our team today to get started.