Pixels and Place

by Kate O'Neill

  Of course different hotel brands all have different characteristics. Those which are geared toward the frequent business traveler are often situated near airports, for example; and they focus on making amenities convenient and accessible. Such branded hotels have the opportunity to highlight different kinds of conveniences through their integrated experiences.

  Upgrade and Upsell

  A lot goes through a person’s mind as they cross the threshold of the hotel where they’ll be spending the next few nights of their life. Depending on what past experiences have taught you to expect, it’s either a moment of mild anxiety or a moment of hope, or more likely a little of both. If an arriving guest is toying with the idea of a bigger room, a better view, a more inclusive package, or any other upgrade they haven’t indulged in yet, this is the hotel’s last best shot at encouraging them to spring for it.

  Finding the Guest Room and Other Indoor Navigation

  We all know hotels and resorts aren’t actually home, but the business they’re in, in a sense, is of making us feel almost as comfortable as being at home, or at least distracting us from what we’re missing at home.

  The technology a hotel might use for wayfinding and navigation, such as beacons, could serve additional purposes. They could provide context about art and exhibits throughout the building, or provide an interactive tour of the resort with turn-by-turn directions and virtual maps.

  The James Hotels uses iBeacon integration in the James Pocket Assistant app and beacons throughout their properties to offer guests a “self-guided” tour of the hotels’ art collections.

  Keyless Room Entry and Security

  While we’re at it, once the guest has checked in without having to go to the front desk, hotels could also potentially do away with hotel room keys and key cards. By allowing a beacon technology to detect the their smartphone, the guest could approach the room and unlock the door automatically.

  Keyless entry (when it works) is a great convenience, saving the guest from having to fumble around in their wallet or bag to retrieve a key. It could arguably be safer and more secure. As a woman who often travels alone, I am conscious of the ways in which my room location and access is compromised during the normal course of a hotel stay. A front desk clerk may announce the room number out loud to me with other people nearby, or they may hand me a key card in a paper jacket marked with the room number. This paper jacket is something I could easily misplace, leaving my room vulnerable. If my check-in process takes place on my phone screen, with no audible announcement of my room number, and room access is linked to my phone as well, there seems to be a much better chance that my room remains private and secure. Or at least I’ll feel that I’m more secure, which is a big step in creating the intended experience anyway.

  Starwood Hotels and Resorts implemented a pilot program in January 2014 in two major hotel locations—Manhattan and Silicon Valley—to test out providing guests with keyless entry. The guests first had to install the Starwood Preferred Guest (SGP) app, but then they had access to a virtual key. Through Bluetooth 4.0, they could access their rooms with a tap of their smartphones. They’ve since then rolled out beacons in dozens of additional hotel locations.

  Beyond frictionless check-in and keyless room entry, this infrastructure in hotels can mean a more personalized experience where at a minimum staff can greet guests by name, if that aligns with the brand. It also lends itself to more subtle service customizations, such as, for example, the cleaning staff knowing when guests are in their room and not. It makes “do not disturb” door hangers seem quaint.

  In-Room Controls

  In an effort to conserve energy, many hotels, especially in Europe, require guests to enter or swipe a key card to turn on the lights. Beacons make that unnecessary: If the guests have logged in through the app on their smartphone or tablet, the beacon can sense their proximity and allow control of lighting and other features of the room, including the TV and the temperature. This can all potentially be controlled right from the app.

  Relevant Room Service

  Another convenience made possible through the connection between beacons and apps is room service. If the guest is in the room as a meal time approaches, the beacon may be able to detect the phone’s presence and push a notification about the special of the day. The push could ask the guest if they would like to order something. What’s more, at some point when booking the room or completing their loyalty program signup, the guest may have indicated their dietary preferences; and the app could make tailored suggestions. (As a frequent traveler who has also been vegan for the past twenty years, I can tell you that this is a data-driven convenience I would welcome.) The app might also include compelling interactive features on how the ingredients are sourced, how the food is prepared, and so on.

  Targeted Offers for On-Site Retail and Dining

  If you’ve ever stayed in one of the big hotels on or anywhere near the Las Vegas Strip, you’ve no doubt seen examples of how on-site retail and dining can add color to the overall hotel brand and experience. For example, on the 16.7-acre grounds of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, the shops and dining options include an Affliction store, a John Varvatos store, a cantina-inspired eatery called Pink Taco, and a twenty-four-hour diner called Mr. Lucky’s. Whether your personal taste delights in or recoils at what the sum of that aggregate brand comes out to be, you can probably acknowledge that these retail and dining components are contributing something to it.

  Beacons can alert guests as they near a venue, where they may receive a targeted offer or special discount. These offers can be based on customizations the guest entered in advance, or that adjust with the guest’s history and as the guest responds to offers. Drink coupons, discounts at shops, deals on show tickets, and more—they can not only be offered, but also strategically offered when the guest is most likely to accept and use the deal. Proximity is as good a starting point for that strategy as anything.

  Even in mainstream chain hotels, retail and dining are big parts of the overall guest engagement strategy. Smaller airport hotels that cater to business travelers often feature convenience stores that sell toiletries, snacks, phone chargers, and other easily forgotten small necessities. Some hotels even offer complimentary toothbrushes, razors, and so on. Whether included or extra, the hotel’s app can make replacing these items a simple matter of checking them from a list, and having them delivered to the door.

  Expedited Check-Out

  Just as beacons and smartphones can streamline check-in, they can also streamline check-out. On the morning the guest is due to depart, their phone can prompt them to check out digitally and can even give them the option to extend their stay. Then, once again without having to stand in line at the front desk, they can review and confirm their receipt and have it emailed to their address.

  Everything Everywhere

  Neither retail nor education nor healthcare nor much of anything takes place exclusively in the physical places—stores, schools, hospitals, etc.—that are reserved for them. So a big movement in many of these industries, and maybe in yours, is to have everything be available from everywhere, yet with context-awareness, location sensitivity, and targeted offers.

  For example, the travel experience isn’t limited to airplanes and hotels; travelers often want to explore, and the savvy travel brands can use this opportunity to engage meaningfully with them with recommendations and resources, such as a wearable device like a bracelet that could help alert them to any traveler-friendly places (such as restaurants, pubs, gyms, or community centers).

  Retailers have had to adopt a “retail is everywhere” mindset, along with the capacity to integrate with wearables for payment, authentication, and even emotional tracking related to purchase behavior.

  “Retail is everywhere, and no longer about a location or a channel.”

  — Patricia Walker, senior managing director of products and North America retail practice lead at Accenture

  Healthcare is happening everywhere, to
o: With hospital occupancy rates long in decline—from 77 percent national inpatient occupancy rate in 1980 to only 60 percent in 201365—and with regulation for reimbursement tightening66, hospital companies have been shifting services to outpatient care for years. Combined with the consumer trend for internet self-diagnosis and the growth of physicians offering services outside of the hospital, these dynamics have set the stage for significant changes to patient care. Any comprehensive look at healthcare must now include telehealth services, where providers offer consultations remotely via computer or phone; patient research online in medical websites and on social media; patient data from wearables; big data analysis67; and more.

  But quality of care is another question. As anyone who’s ever Googled their symptoms knows, every possible diagnosis includes cancer or imminent death. More critically, protecting patient health data is a must, and that doesn’t change no matter how the care is offered.

  The data safety consideration of this everything-all-the-time imperative can easily become challenging in any application. Such has been the case with the controversy surrounding New York City’s LinkNYC program, aimed at replacing 7,500 old pay phones with “new structures called Links. Each Link will provide superfast, free public Wi-Fi, phone calls, device charging and a tablet for Internet browsing, access to city services, maps and directions.”68

  But the initiative has been criticized for how certain aspects of the kiosks could expose users to hackers, its corporate ties and heritage, its carte blanche access to user data, and its ability to use that data to target advertising, which is what pays for the $200 million program.69

  The legitimacy of any of these criticisms is subject to debate, but the lesson remains: Anytime a project attempts to use personal data to offer goods or services, there are going to be more far-reaching considerations than how quickly it pays for itself. Smart cities and the tools they introduce could potentially do a lot of good, but simply collecting a lot of data from connected devices and then targeting advertising to it is the kind of model that inherently invites scrutiny. We’ve all de facto agreed to an advertising-driven model of content presentation; now it’s just a question of degree. The LinkNYC kiosks may be on the far side of that spectrum of degree, but they’re not without precedent.

  And to some extent or other, every implementation of integrated experience that attempts to be always-on and tuned to cues in the person’s environment is dancing along the cliff edge of what we’ve agreed to in the implicit social contract about sharing and using our data. But the need for privacy and security is real, just as the overall trend is toward decentralization of services into a more conceptual experience of the “place” in which people experience those services. We must align our organizations’ futures with that of the people we serve, which means protecting their data safety while providing quality service that is relevant and contextual, wherever they happen to be.

  Retail: Transcending the Transactional and Creating Value Beyond the Purchase

  Retail, at its core, is about experiences that transcend the transactional. Creating a sense of value that goes beyond the purchase.

  How can connected experiences help retailers live up to the ideal?

  Retail has been the proving ground of the convergence of physical space and digital experience, and the future of retail depends on its continuing to hybridize the experiences. The industry’s hand has been forced by the sharp ascent of e-commerce over the past two decades. A June 2015 McKinsey Global Institute report found that IoT is forecasted to have a total economic impact between $3.9 and $11.1 trillion a year by 2025. Of that, $410 billion to $1.2 trillion per year will be implemented in retail environments, between self-checkout technologies, merchandise layout optimization, smart customer-relationship management applications, and more.70 Not only this, according to recent Juniper Research, retailers are predicted to invest $2.5 billion in IoT by 2020, nearly four times their 2015 investment. Much of that investment will be in iBeacon Technology and RFID.71

  Showrooming and Webrooming

  In the first wave, the so-called “brick and mortar” store experience was almost thought to be a liability. With some understanding of how to converge some of the best of both worlds, “bricks and clicks” was born. But with this phenomenon came an understanding of the concept of “showrooming,” where consumers visited a physical store to experience a product (such as shoes or apparel) in person; tried the product on to limit the inconvenience of dealing with the prospect of returning an item through shipping services; then purchased the product online, where prices might be lower, or selection might be broader. According to a 2015 Accenture report, 65 percent of US shoppers are likely to participate in showrooming.72

  But in time we recognized the growth of “webrooming,” too, where consumers used the internet to research products and even purchase them, but chose to complete their purchase or simply pick the product up in a physical store. This is most likely motivated by the convenience and instant gratification of immediate pickup. Perhaps surprising, the percentage of US shoppers likely to participate in webrooming is even higher than showrooming according to the same Accenture report: 69 percent. Think of purchasing a new laptop at the Apple Store, for example. The advantage to this from a consumer’s perspective might be the opportunity to ensure the exact desired product is available, and obtain the product the same day. Or the customer can get a custom code sent by email or SMS to pick up their merchandise from a storage locker, sometimes located outside the store so that it can be accessed at the customer’s convenience, at any time of day or night.

  Click and Collect; In-Store Pickup Services; BOPIS

  Customers can place orders online and pick up the product at a time convenient for them, even after the store’s closing if the store offers lockers. This is known as buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS). Beacons can further improve this customer experience by signaling to an associate when a customer who has ordered a product online has entered the store, so the associate can tend to them quickly.

  Targeted Offers

  With customer data from online and in-store combined, retailers have unprecedented insights about what makes people decide to buy. They can use this to offer increasingly personalized messages.

  Target rolled out beacons to fifty stores in 2015, and while other retailers have had to experiment and adapt their practices from trial and perhaps error, Target has been proactive in determining what its approach will be, perhaps informed by observing other retailers’ experiments. For example, they specify that they will present no more than two messages per device per shopping trip. “And we’ll make sure the alerts and in-app updates provide compelling content and offers,” the company said in its news release.

  They’ve already been using app-based in-store commerce for several years, having rolled out Shopkick’s rewards app at all 1,700 locations in 2012. This allows consumers to scan products in Target’s aisles to redeem discounts known as “kicks” from Target gift cards, Facebook credits, dining gift certificates, iTunes downloads, donations to charities, and other sites.73

  Smarter Showrooms

  By embracing this trend and working with the technology available, retailers can do innovative things. In Toronto in May 2016, IKEA staged a pop-up showroom using augmented reality and Google Cardboard viewers for digital exploration in physical space, which meant that visitors could, according to IKEA’s web page about the event, “experience four different IKEA kitchens with virtual reality showcasing various door fronts, cabinets, appliances, sinks, storage solutions and more.”74

  Online Trying Out Offline Presence

  Here and there, we’re seeing online models that are dipping toes into the waters of offline.

  Amazon has been opening brick-and-mortar bookstores.75 Casper, the mattress company, has been an interesting case study with not only its retail “apartment” showroom76, where New Yorkers can see and try the mattress in the context of an apartment setting, but also their mobile “Nap Tou
r” truck77 that appeared in cities across the United States. Rent the Runway opened four physical stores in 2015, which prompted their traffic to spike: their unique visits increased by 100K in one year.78

  Social Media Location Sharing

  Both pop-up stores and retail trucks must rely on something other than people’s knowledge of them to draw customers. They need to communicate their existence by some means to potential customers who might be nearby and interested. For most of the early 2010s, Twitter has been a nearly ideal channel for this, as its timeline was chronological (until early 2016); and the way users tended to consume Twitter content was transitory, so if a retailer posted a location one day but was in a different spot the next, it wasn’t too likely that the content would be confusing for prospective customers. Since Twitter introduced an algorithmically-driven timeline, however, that dynamic is changing. Meanwhile, other options have been emerging, including Snapchat, which skews toward a younger demographic who may be more familiar with and predisposed to using pop-up and mobile options anyway.