Smart Mobility Platform for Retailers
Drive Traffic, Loyalty, and Sales with Effective, Easy-to-Manage Mobility Solutions
Solution Brief
At A Glance
Aerohive solutions for retail provide a range of mobility capabilities that help retailers improve the in-store customer experience and operations while complying with Payment Card Industry (PCI regulations) and simplifying management.
Key Features
• Resilient, self-healing network based on Aerohive’s innovative co-operative control plane architecture
• Integrated security with automated context-aware Mobile Device Management capabilities for policy implementation and enforcement
• Cloud-enabled visibility and control to critical applications for efficient utilization
• Robust guest Wi-Fi access
• Cloud-based analytics to deliver instant visibility into store traffic and shopper behavior
Retail Industry Trends
Consumers’ reliance on mobile smart devices is forcing retailers to radically change the way that they deliver a superior customer experience:
• Empowered shoppers: Shoppers are armed with information before they enter a store. They shop anytime, anywhere, and rely on their mobile devices for comparing prices, finding store locations, reading product reviews, checking availability, and soliciting opinions from their friends before purchasing.
• E-commerce options raise consumer expectations: Lower prices,
“showrooming” features, free shipping, and instant reviews raise customers’
service expectations.
• Analytics deliver more insight: Web analytics give online retailers valuable data about customers and buying behaviors, which they can use to tailor the
shopping experience per customers. As a result, online retailers have better
insight into their customers than traditional storefront retailers.
Smart Mobility Platform for Retailers
Strategies for Increasing In-store Traffic, Loyalty, and Sales
Almost half of retailers believe that a mobility strategy is important to enhancing their brands and effectively extending their online offerings to the store environment. In-store Wi-Fi and Internet access will be essential to help them increase traffic, customer loyalty, and sales. Wi- Fi helps improve in-store customer service in many ways. Customers can easily check gift registries and take advantage of self-service options. By equipping sales associates with mobile devices, they can more easily check product availability, answer specific product questions, and receive training. Stores can use Wi-Fi for mobile point-of-sale (POS)
capabilities and analytics to track wait times, traffic patterns, support mobile payment, and deliver staff training.
Mobility can also help stores improve engagement with customers. It enables customers to easily stay connected while in the store, reducing the risk of them leaving. Stores can take advantage of mobile applications to support their digital marketing efforts, personalized offers, loyalty programs, and in-store navigation.
In-store Wi-Fi also helps retailers better integrate their sales channels. For example, they can offer in-store shoppers an expanded product assortment through their online channel. They can implement features such shipping products to the nearest store or the customer’s home, and unify a shopper’s shopping cart. Data gathered across channels provides a more
holistic view of the customer and increases opportunities for upselling and cross selling.
Finally, analytics software offers a range of exciting opportunities to improve the customer experience through data gathered in the store. Retailers can gain a much clearer view of which promotions attract the most traffic, dwell times, peak traffic times, and other data points for sales and marketing reporting.
Aerohive Retail Mobility Solutions
Aerohive delivers secure in-store mobility solutions that enable retailers to provide high
security for addressing Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance, enhance the customer experience with robust guest Wi-Fi, and support integrated retail analytics initiatives.
Connecting Retail Locations and Resources
Today’s WLANs carry inventory and transaction system traffic, enterprise resource planning
Figure 1: A typical Aerohive Branch on Demand implementation.
Aerohive Branch on Demand™ is a cloud-enabled networking solution that simplifies
provisioning, management, security, and troubleshooting for remote deployments. Using the cloud, Aerohive Branch on Demand provides a zero-touch, auto-provisioned branch
network, complete with wired and wireless connectivity that is ideal for a wide range of retail environments, such as stores, kiosks, and distribution centers. With costs as low as $99 per branch per year, retailers gain significant CAPEX and OPEX savings while maintaining visibility into remote networks, meeting security objectives and compliance standards, and
increasing productivity.
Addressing Security and PCI Compliance
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) recognizes wireless LANs as public networks and assumes that they are exposed to public vulnerabilities and threats.
Smart cybercriminals can configure servers, laptops, printers, and other devices to exploit
weaknesses in point-of-sale (POS) terminals or other store systems, even if there is not a
wireless network deployed. As a result, retailers must secure their own mobile devices
connected to the network and prevent unauthorized devices from attaching to the
network.
Smart Mobility Platform for Retailers
Figure 2: Aerohive Client Manager solution automates mobile device enrollment and management
Aerohive provides context-aware security enforcement capabilities that protect users and the network based on user identity, device, location, and time-of-day attributes. Aerohive Client Manager is a cloud-enabled solution that automates enrollment of mobile devices to fully embrace company-owned devices to address PCI requirements while enabling in-store customers to securely access allowable areas of the retailer’s website, such as its online store. Retailers can ensure that devices are accessing the right content; they automatically configure devices to access resources, distribute and troll software and apps, and collect information and track usage and licensing.
Provide Robust Guest Wi-Fi
Retailers want to quickly enable guest access for their customers or their suppliers without
worrying about any complex set-up especially at their branch sites. Most branch sites lack
any dedicated IT staff so they require a simple-to-deploy solution that enables secure guest
access. Aerohive’s ID Manager is the first enterprise guest management system to leverage
the cloud to simplify and automate the deployment and maintenance of enterprise guest
management without any additional software or hardware. With ID Manager, retailers can
they would like to have their credentials immediately forwarded to them. Methods include SMS, email, directly on the screen, or Twitter direct message.
Figure 3: Registration Portal for Guests
Gain Better Insight to Improve the Customer Experience
An Aerohive WLAN can detect and anonymize the Wi-Fi signals coming from users’ smart devices while in the store. By connecting through the cloud to the Euclid Analytics
application, the Wi-Fi signals generate a range of location data that can be used to
improve in-store business operations.
Smart Mobility Platform for Retailers
Figure 4: Aerohive Retail Analytics solution data flow
Retailers can track metrics, which can be accessed via a standard web browser. Metrics include:
• Acquisition: The number of people who walk by a store without coming in;
the number of people seen inside the store; percentage of people seen outside that come into the store.
• Loyalty: The average number of times a person visits a store in a 30-day window; number of days since a visitor was last seen; percentage of visitors that have come in before.
• Engagement: Amount of time visitors spends inside the store; how many visitors stay for a specified period of time. For example, what percentage of visitors stays for long enough to make a purchase? How does this compare to the average across all of your stores?
Analytics data provides valuable data that was previously difficult—or impossible—to obtain,
enabling retailers to answer a wide range of operational questions. A convenient network
dashboard makes it easy to view customer behavior at a glance.
Quotes
"Aerohive treated us like a partner with a common interest. Combined with the cost, network management, and security benefits the Cooperative Control Architecture delivers, the outstanding service and professionalism of the Aerohive team sealed the deal for us. "
—Gayle Crouch Director of IT 7-Eleven Stores
“The solution has fitted our business model perfectly. It’s reliable, more cost-effective than our previous solution, and the fact that we can manage all of these devices and Access Points from a central point is exactly what we were after.”
—Rod Koza Chief Information Officer, Drakes Supermarkets
"The technology in retail changes constantly. Aerohive gives us a future-proof solution to meet whatever our needs will be.”
—Brian Eley Technology Analyst Scottish Midland Co-operative Society Ltd.
About Aerohive
People want to work anywhere; on any device, and IT needs to enable them -- without drowning in complexity or compromising on security, performance, reliability or cost.
Aerohive's mission is to Simpli-Fi these access networks with a cloud-enabled, self-organizing, service-aware, identity-based infrastructure that includes innovative Wi-Fi, VPN, branch routing and switching solutions.
Aerohive was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. The company's investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northern Light Venture Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) and Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). For more information, please visit www.aerohive.com, call us at 408-510-6100, follow us on Twitter @Aerohive, subscribe to our blog, join our community or become a fan on our Facebook page.
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