Xpertek Contact, the customer experience management division of the Xpertek Group, has partnered with Canadian-based Turnstyle Solutions to launch Turnstyle’s cloud-based solution and products in southern Africa.
Turnstyle develops a range of social WiFi, location-based marketing, reporting and analytics solutions for the offline retail market, designed to automate customer interactions and marketing campaigns through value-added in-store services.
According to Xpertek Contact managing director Chris Cochrane, the partnership will appeal to retailers looking to leverage their investment in free WiFi services for in-store customers, combining Xpertek’s local market knowledge with Turnstyle’s proven technology.
“The deployment and expansion of WiFi networks in South Africa is at an all-time high,” says Cochrane. “That said, free WiFi providers are struggling to monetise their service and achieve a measurable return on investment.
“Working with Turnstyle we can offer our customers an immediate and effective solution to this challenge, which, when combined with our own existing customer touch point solutions, enhance the customer experience while generating valuable and actionable marketing data for retailers.”
Turnstyle CEO and founder Devon Wright says Xpertek is the ideal partner to bring the Turnstyle brand and solutions to the southern African market.
“We were struck by Xpertek’s insightful industry knowledge of the local market,” notes Wright.
“Our mission is to give customers the experience they deserve while providing retailers with a comprehensive view of how their customers engage their services online and in-store. Our success therefore greatly depends on understanding retail and customer dynamics in the regions we operate in, so having a partner like Xpertek openly share its market knowledge and impressive go-to-market models was a critical step to doing business here.”
Turnstyle helps retailers gather information on their customers’ behaviour, shopping habits and in-store and online activities in order to answer critical marketing questions such as:
* Are efforts better spent on attracting new clients or retaining existing ones?
* Are clients lost due to under staffing?
* Which types of signage delivers the highest walk-by conversion?
* What types of promotions bring new clientele?
* How are stores performing relative to each other?
“Customers tend to expect free WiFi when they visit certain retail establishments,” says Cochrane. “As it stands, providing this service does little more than add to the cost of doing business. Using Turnstyle’s public WiFi Software as a Service solution, however, we can now tie-in WiFi access with customers’ social media portals (such as Facebook and Twitter), giving our retail customers a means of gathering valuable marketing information with consent.”
In doing so, retailers can tie-in their WiFi services to a customer’s physical location, allowing them to, for example, generate customer contact lists for marketing purposes, automatically post social media ‘check-ins’ to increase brand presence, and recommend products and promotions based on the customer’s online behaviour.
“The rapid expansion of smart device use in the region has resulted in an exponential increase in demand for anywhere, anytime WiFi access. This in turn creates opportunities for smart retailers to take advantage of social WiFi, location-based marketing and presence analytics solutions to markedly improve their competitive advantage and brand appeal,” concludes Cochrane.
