4 Benefits of a Captive Portal – Seamless Wifi (SaaS)

Captive Portal is a technology utilized by businesses all around the world, and understandably so, it brings many benefits for the owner, as well as management. Captive Portal can be used in several different ways to support marketing, security and customer satisfaction. Here are 4 reasons your business should invest in and utilize a Captive Portal for more accelerated growth.

1. Collect customers’ contact details

When you’ve already managed to convince someone to visit your company, they have a problem that your company might be able to solve. Additionally, if they’ve paid for your service, or bought your product, you must’ve provided them with value. Having said that, your next goal should be to turn them into returning customers, which is easier done if you have their contact details. This is one way to utilize the captive portal technology. You can exchange internet access for customers’ email addresses. These email addresses can then be used for marketing purposes. Even easier so, that our platform is integrated with major email marketing services such as SendGrid or MailChimp. These seamless integrations allow for the quickest and most efficient workflow when targetting returning customers.

2. Raise brand awareness

Another marketing benefit of a captive portal is the power of raising brand awareness by using advertisements. Displaying your logo on the splash page makes it more likely for the end-user to recognize your company when they see the logo next time either on the internet or on a physical advert. Making your brand recognizable is a tremendous help when attempting to generate more customer interactions. Additionally, since we at IronWifi provide you with full access to the source code of your splash page, which you can access in our console, it is more than simple to add custom content to the splash page such as pop-ups, banners that show special offers…etc. Moreover, you can customize all email templates with your company’s logo and design language, to raise your brand’s awareness as much as possible.

3. Generate revenue

Revenue generation from a captive portal can be done by either selling internet access or putting advertisements on the splash page. IronWifi supports both. With us, you can set up a third-party payment gateway such as Paypal, and receive payments from your end users from within the splash page. Not only can you accept payments, but you can also sell custom usage plans depending on the pricing model you want to choose for your end-users. IronWifi allows you to create different usage plans that restrict the session time, browsing speed or number of devices per account. Other than that, using the statistical data collected from a captive portal can be helpful when attracting new customers, ergo helping you generate more revenue.

4. Protect your visitors

An attacker might conduct an Evil Twin attack, which incorporates creating a fake wifi hotspot, with a similar SSID to trick your visitors into connecting to their fake hotspot. When your visitor connects to the attacker’s computer, thinking that they are connected to your company’s wifi hotspot, their data is in danger since all traffic goes to the attacker’s device. A Captive Portal reassures your visitors that they can trust the wifi they have connected to. Being connected to public wifi is dangerous in and of itself, and adding this layer of security helps protect you and your visitors.

Conclusion

A Captive Portal might seem like a technologically complicated thing to set up. That is, however, untrue since with us you can get your captive portal up and running within minutes. Our extensive documentation helps you set everything up, and if desired, our technical support team is at your disposal in case anything goes awry.

How to Automate WiFi at a Coworking Space/Premise

Wi-Fi is the most expected and probably the most substantial service provided by coworking spaces.  Poor experience with your Wi-Fi can seriously harm your brand image as members come to your coworking space to get the work done. In this article, we are going to discuss how to automate management and make access to your wireless networks much more convenient for members. 

How Do Your Customers Get Online?

Ten to one, you have posters with Wi-Fi password hanging on the walls around the space. So, clients have to find such a poster and manually type in the code. Or maybe you send them login details via email. In both scenarios “What is Wi-Fi password” is probably the most frequent question at the reception desk.

Manual operations such as typing and copy-pasting the codes are not the best experiences you want for customers. What if a person can’t check their email because they need to get online first? Coworkers will come to the help desk and ask an administrator for assistance.  A workspace manager will surely help them but did you ever think that getting online must be way easier for people that pay money to use your Internet? 

An Easier Way to Access Wi-Fi for Coworking Space Customers

The hospitality industry is moving towards automation of workflows. At the same time, flexible workspace managers don’t want to overcomplicate the life of their customers by making them use one more app. They strive to integrate solutions they utilize in order to provide tenants with a single platform they can use for everything—booking, communication, payments, application for benefits and services, etc. 

Why not use the same logic for Wi-Fi access? What would you say about a single passwordless log in for your customers when they don’t have to remember the codes or ask the manager for ones?  

Members and guests of your coworking space log in to your app, the system automatically authenticates the user, generates one-time passwords, and gives immediate access to the appropriate network (Wi-Fi Members, Wi-Fi Guests, etc.)   

Such kind of automation can streamline the entire process of granting and revoking access to Wi-Fi for managers of your coworking space and make getting online effortless for members and customers. 

Automate Wi-Fi Management at Your Coworking Space

1. Reduce the Number of Steps

We have already mentioned the integration strategy above. Here is a perfect place to elaborate on this.

Oxbow has built an integration with Seamless Wifi, which is a cloud-based authentication platform for wireless and wired networks that plugs into almost any popular Wi-Fi hardware enabling seamless automatic access to wireless internet networks of a coworking space.

In other words, by integrating your main workspace management system with a solution such as Seamless WiFi, you will free your members and guests from looking or asking for Wi-Fi password and manually inserting it to get connected to the Internet.

When both systems are integrated, your customers are automatically authenticated by the app they already use with your flexible workspace and get either immediate access (in case of valid membership) or a one-time confirmation code (in case of exterior customers) to go online. No administrator’s assistance is required.

Such automation eliminates unnecessary actions both from customers’ and administrators’ sides, which is a much better way to handle your Wi-Fi.

2. Separate Networks for Different Types of Coworkers

Almost every coworking space mentions secure lightning-fast Wi-Fi in its marketing messages. High Internet speed is really critical for members, so you must meet their expectations, which is challenging if you are using one password and network for everyone. This exposes your members to security risks and forces them to put up with a sluggish network.

Wi-Fi automation will let you forget about the issue, allow to have as many networks for your customers as you wish/need, and connect each customer group (members, daypassers, meeting participants, event attendees) to a specific network without any effort from the manager’s side. 

More on the process in the next section. 

3. Give Access to Wi-Fi Based on Conditions

The logic behind Wi-Fi automation is that you are going to provide two types of access to your wireless networks.

• Unconditional

Unconditional access is granted to members with pre-paid plans and workspace administrators. In fact, for members, the log in to their coworking app equals to log in to Wi-Fi. No additional password is required. 

• Conditional

This type of access is applied to non-members and is based on a certain condition. For instance, room or desk booking, event ticket, visit registered through the reception tablet, etc. After the booking, plan, whatever was paid in your workspace app, the system checks the criteria of the event, generates a one-time code, and gives relevant access to Wi-Fi. 

4. Manage Wi-Fi at Your Workspace Like a Pro

Did you ever face the situation when members that left your coworking space appeared in your network? If you glue passwords on the wall or don’t have the correct access revoke procedure, everyone can steal your internet and threaten the cyber safety of the authorized users.

With automated Wi-Fi you will manage such cases like a pro. No more access for unauthorized people. The system revokes it as easily as it grants it. As soon as a membership plan/visit/booking/event comes to an end, the customer loses temporary access to your Wi-Fi.     

5. Analyze Wi-Fi Usage Data

And the last but not least step of Wi-Fi automation is data analysis. Every coworking space manager wants to know how many hours customers spend in the building. This is essential for hourly billing, security, and understanding space utilization metrics. 

Seamless WiFi integrated with your coworking space platform has got you covered here. The system offers built-in analytical tools that will provide you with detailed Wi-Fi usage data by automatically tracking and recording all customers’ activities. You see who is going online, when, and what device is used. You can walk the extra mile and connect Google Analytics to the available solutions. This will give you the possibility to monitor all available networks in real time.    

Final Words

Summarizing everything said above, automation of Wi-Fi at your coworking space is another lap of total workspace automation. It brings additional comfort to your members and saves more time for your managers.