Whether you are in retail or industrial IoT, chances are you are trying to figure out how to use beacons to improve to improve your operations.  The secret is that, just like any other tools, beacons are just an ingredient and what matters most is the type of information you broadcast and how you broadcast it.

Here are a few examples on how you can use beacons to communicate with your end-users both for regular communications and during crisis/emergency management. 

Some examples:

  1) A museum can send information about a piece of art to its patrons.  That's the classic example you will see all the time. However, how about going a step further and sending some personalized messages in case the patron is also a museum donor?  Finally, the same beacon could also be used to send some relevant information to the maintenance and curation staff.

  2) A city is likely looking into beacons within the context of city-tours and information.  Much like a museum in a sense.  However, the very same devices could also be used to give relevant, neighborhood-centric, information to the citizen and also be used during emergencies (such as floods or power shutdowns) to help the city's staff better assess and react to problems.

  3) If you manage an at-home elderly care, you should consider using beacons to ensure that your staff has visited the patient at the proper time so you can be more reactive and provide better patient care.  If you are aware of problems before they happen then you can address them better and get ahead of the competition. 

Finally, we highly recommend including a geographic layer in your beacon-analysis.  For example, we use content from ESRI (a GIS provider) to enrich the information collected and distributed by the beacons.  This added layer will help you learn more about your operations and your customers/end-users.

If you already have beacons in your organization and want to use them further or if you are interested in testing new communication channels, go ahead and contact us, we'll be happy to give you some options and help you get started.