Whether you spend your professional life operating a range of thriving restaurants or work hard to provide your hotel guests with their ideal stay, Wi-Fi plays a significant role in your overall customer experience strategy.
As of December 2018, Hosting Facts shared that there were 4.1 billion internet users around the globe, meaning Wi-Fi connection is an expectation basically anywhere, especially for guests of retail, restaurant, and service-based spaces. In order to maintain your place in the competitive modern marketplace, offering your guests or customers a reliable internet connection can help you stand out from your competition.
Often, businesses who offer free Wi-Fi services utilize captive portals, a web page with directions for a user to authorize their use of the Wi-Fi service before they’re connected. Captive portals can be a win-win for all parties involved. For customers, these portals allow them to quickly and easily connect to Wi-Fi wherever they may be. For businesses, captive portals provide a wide range of benefits, including:
- Brand recognition: Captive portals are a key location to put branding assets like your company logo and tagline. This can help build brand awareness and cultivate a sense of trust that the Wi-Fi connection is provided for your customers exclusively by your business.
- Control of Wi-Fi usage: Depending on the type of business you operate it might be in your company’s best interest to use a captive portal with set data usage limits.
- Data collection: When setting up a captive portal, businesses have the option to include data capture features, such as terms and conditions, username creation, or social media logins.
Captive Portal Wi-Fi Login
Of the 4.1 billion internet users globally, there are an estimated 2.77 billion people using various social media platforms, including 2.27 billion Facebook users, 1 billion Instagram users, 260 million LinkedIn users, and 326 million Twitter users, all of which are active monthly, according to Hosting Facts.
With such a large global population using social media on a regular basis, it makes sense that companies would choose to use social media login on captive portals.
A successful captive portal is one that is as simple as possible for your guests and customers to use. Rather than attempting to collect customer information with an account creation process or asking clients to input their information into multiple fields, offering a social login option simplifies access to Wi-Fi, and in turn, may increase the amount of successful logins while obtaining more data.
Benefits of Social Logins
Other than creating an easy and seamless Wi-Fi login opportunity, are there other benefits to using social media logins on your captive portal? Of course! In addition to creating a quick and trusted login method for your customers, businesses can reap the rewards of demonstrating how they value their customer’s time.
Some other key benefits of pushing social media logins on your captive portal include:
Businesses can stay in the minds of their customers
Often, social media login information also acts as the contact information for the customers, and by asking for permission to connect with customers—by offering discounts, deals, and promotional materials—you can keep up the conversation and reach out to prospects and loyal customers alike long after they’ve logged off your Wi-Fi.
Social logins on captive portals boost brand awareness and recognition
If you’re providing a space for social logins, why not share your social media links, too? On the captive portal page, insert links to your brand’s social media pages to prompt another layer of connection between your business and your customers.
You’ll enhance the customer experience of your most loyal patrons
Not only does a social media login on your captive portal make it easy and accessible for customers or guests to login, but it can help your business collect valuable guest data to help you create an enhanced customer experience.
When you create an opportunity for guests to login using their social media accounts, you can gain a better understanding of their unique needs and behaviors. Through prompting them to ‘Like’ your Facebook page or by providing an area for them to confirm their subscription to your email newsletter, you’ll be able to keep in touch and monitor feedback to keep refining the customer experience.
Although the majority of your customers will most likely have an account on a social media platform, it’s important to remember that not everyone will. To make your Wi-Fi services as accessible as possible, ensure you include an option to login using another avenue, such as via an email account, or by filling out a short form. This way, you can still gather contact information while being inclusive to those who choose not to utilize social media.
If you’re looking for a way to capitalize on your Wi-Fi investment with little effort, consider allowing social media logins on your captive portal.
Datavalet provides high-speed Wi-Fi network management to guest and staff across your business. We can transform Wi-Fi from commodity to business value.