McDonald’s & Piper Get Together for iBeacon Service in Restaurants
One of the latest technologies in mobile commerce is the iBeacon, a Bluetooth low energy-based beacon by which businesses can keep tabs on where people are in a building, and by extension, where said customers’ attention is focused.
This comes in very handy in major retail operations, where businesses can discover if a particular display item is drawing much attention, but a new and interesting use of this technology comes from McDonald’s, who has turned to Piper for installation of new iBeacon systems in several Columbus, Georgia locations.
Some might wonder at the point of what would seem to be technological excess for its own sake, but McDonald’s has an idea here; with the Piper’s platform in place, word from a recent release notes, McDonald’s customers with iOS and Android devices will be able to get access to a wide array of content.
Users will get access to things like coupon offers, customer surveys, and even job listings as the customers enter the restaurant, meaning that any relevant alerts can be particularly timely, and cued to when the users enter the building.
Indeed, those who find the idea somewhat excess may wish to take note that the effort is paying off for those McDonald’s locations, and pretty substantially.
Not only were over 18,000 individual offers redeemed during that time, according to word from the company, but McChicken sales were up eight percent on the previous month, and McNuggets—already a popular item by most any reckoning—saw a 7.5 percent jump in sales over that same month. With those kinds of successes in hand, it’s not surprising that the company is looking to build on them, offering more in the way of customer satisfaction surveys and employment options.
While it’s not immediately clear if those customer satisfaction surveys come with any extra impetus for filling them out, like a free Big Mac or the like, that would probably make quite a bit of difference in response.
Yet here, we see the fullest extent of the mobile commerce concept.
Yes, mobile payments are important to the system, but there’s a lot more going on here than just making payments. With the fullest range of mobile commerce tools, we can make payments, gather information, change business lines, and improve service to the standards of the public that puts such things to use. That’s a win-win for all concerned; businesses provide better customer service, customers get better service, customers come back to the business and carry out more business with the firm in question.
Hard not to spot a winner in all that.
It all starts with things like this; with mobile payment systems, with iBeacon tracking mechanisms, with knowing just who comes into a business and just what that person is likely to want. It’s the kind of thing that can make a business great, and provide a 21st century advantage.