PACE, Australia: Cognizant’s Australia Head of Digital Business Strategy Says Indoor Location-Based Services and Data Science Technologies can Help Businesses Earn Customer Loyalty
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“Since Apple launched its iBeacon technology in 2013, followed by Google’s Eddystone last year, location-based services (LBS) have popped up everywhere,” writes Susan Brown. “By using real-time geo-data and GPS coordinates from mobile devices, beacon technologies have empowered brands and brick-and-mortar stores to reach new levels of ultra-personalized customer experiences.” Excerpts:
“While beacon technologies have clearly helped brands, especially retailers and marketers, enter a new age, there are still various challenges businesses need to overcome. Unlike outdoor scenarios, where there are few obstructions between the satellite and mobile device, indoor scenarios can be thwarted by numerous obstructions. They present two types of problems in the form of blocking objects and reflecting objects.
A key driver of commercial success with location-aware applications is real-time tracking, which involves using the triangulation method of measuring distance and angle to determine the position of users. The challenge lies around the ability to determine positions within a limited space and address blocking and reflecting objects in indoor locations.
As a result of these various challenges, many businesses are awaiting a technological breakthrough to take their LBS projects indoor. The opportunities leveraged by analytic technologies could be the answer.
To apply beacon technology to sophisticated indoor scenarios, IT engineers need to switch to a statistical approach. This could involve recording RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) at different physical points to predict the position of mobile devices using machine learning algorithms.
This approach consists of four key steps: User adoption, data acquisition, training the model, and real-time prediction.
With proximity marketing set to be a US $52.46 billion market by 2022, there’s a clear and significant opportunity for retailers and marketers to take customer experiences to the next level for real gains. Those able to overcome the barriers of indoor LBS, and take advantage of data science technologies will be the ones ruling this space and earning the loyalty of consumers before competitors.”
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