- Why free internet?
talkIT provides wireless internet hardware and service. Our wireless nodes are provided by businesses who have unlimited bandwidth connection to the internet and do not use the connection at night.
Attract More Customers/Get Customers to Purchase More Products/Services: Attracting more customers is key to virtually all businesses, and particularly retail locations. This is because much of a retail location's costs are fixed (e.g., rent, core staff). As such, each new customer represents significant profit. Likewise, once a customer is at a location, providing services that keep them in the location longer (e.g., offering WiFi service), often results in increased sales of the location's core products.
Improve Customer Loyalty and Retention: Retaining customers is critical to the success of owners and operators of all businesses. Consider the following statistics:
Acquiring new customers can cost five times more than satisfying and retaining current customers
A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10%
The average company loses 10% of its customers each year
A 5% reduction in customer defection rate can increase profits by 25-125%, depending on the industry
The customer profitability rate tends to increase over the life of a retained customer
Location owners and operators need to focus on their core strengths. For instance, a restaurant needs to focus on preparing the highest quality meals and offering the best service. Conversely, a restaurant operator generally lacks technology skills and does not have the resources to invest significant man-hours to this area. As such, technological offerings to these customers must be easy to purchase, install and service.
For this reason, paid hotspot solutions are not appealing to most clients since to offer this service they must:
Choose a billing solution and back-end support
Purchase an access point or a "hotspot in a box" from a separate company
Purchase a high-speed internet connection from yet another company
Get end-users to pay to use the Hotspot.
Here's the irony in WiFi public access pricing: retailers can be profitable by offering free WiFi as a customer acquisition tool. But when they charge for WiFi access, these retailers, and the WISPs serving them, almost certainly lose money. Retailers are quickly learning this lesson: up to 30% of US location owners who plan to deploy commercial hotspots in 2004 intend those hotspots to be free or free-with-purchase.
The fully loaded cost of offering FREE WiFi access is less than $4/day. Operating a billable hotspot costs over $30/day. Half this cost comes from building or altering billing systems, plus the endless associated customer care. The millions of dollars already spent on systems to charge WiFi users by the megabyte, minute, etc., will never be recuperated. Someday, authentication should become cheap enough to be part of a profitable WiFi offering, but for the foreseeable future, authorization and accounting remain dangerous distractions.
Whether free or for a fee, public WiFi access provides benefits to locations including attracting customers, increasing sales, and giving customers a better experience. When it's free, it simply provides the added, and important, benefit to end-users of being free. Better satisfying customers through offering free WiFi access clearly will aid in better satisfying and retaining customers.
Using talkIT’s proprietary hardware and software solutions, we can offer locations a greater level of service, security and more flexibility than traditional, off-the-shelf wireless solutions.
Our Wireless Zones create the opportunity for your location to present patrons with a “custom web site” containing your location specific information such as menu items, pricing, and news before they login. This new customer touch point will present a unique marketing opportunity that can be viewed from both within the establishment and the geographic area surrounding the location.
Business Benefits
Free WiFi Access for the customer
Exposure via custom WiFi web site for the local establishment
Our WiFi Zones bring in new customers that are brand and venue loyal and have disposable income
talkIT provides a Wireless Security Client that encrypts wireless information sent by customers
talkIT provides free web site tools that allow locations to display up-to-date business information
Online Usage statistics are provided at no cost to help determine frequency of wireless use and increase in patronage
Benefits to Patrons
FREE high speed WiFi access for laptops,
No pop-up advertising
Location information and specials shown to patrons
Digital Signage
talkIT can provide digital kiosks (a computer monitor running a presentation) to qualified locations. Users will be provided information about the wireless service, location information, sponsor messages and news tickers within a compelling interface Kiosk content can be added and edited easily by the site owner
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