Guest WiFi Management: What You Offer Your Customers Counts

How you offer your customers WiFi can shape your business’s success. A bit of guest WiFi management goes an incredibly long way. Great customer WiFi helps your guests to relax and enjoy the experience your business offers. So, it’s essential that you proactively manage your guest WiFi.

WiFi management includes everything from creating a captive portal to how you name your WiFi network. It covers ensuring your WiFi is secure for guests and improving customers’ experience on your network. But it equally covers how to manage your WiFi to benefit your business more. For instance, adding captive portals and incorporating them into a broader marketing strategy.

As you can see, there’s loads to consider. Managing your guest WiFi is a big task. Luckily, many tasks are one-offs, so you’ll be doing ad hoc maintenance work when you get set up. So this initial research you are doing will set you in great stead.

In this guide, we’ll teach you everything you need to know about managing your guest WiFi to guarantee absolute guest satisfaction. If you want to offer guests the best and get the best results back, here’s everything you need to know.

Top 3 Guest WiFi Management Software

One way to simplify guest WiFi management is through management software. Guest WiFi management software handles all the mundane stuff for you. It also has built-in tools to customize your WiFi to improve the guest experience. Choosing management software is a fantastic way to simplify your guest WiFi journey.

In this section, we’ll introduce you to the leading guest WiFi management software on the market. Here are the top software to consider.

1. Start Hotspot

Start Hotspot manages your guest WiFi and provides easy in-program customization tools, helping you with splash pages. It lets you create, control, and manage the WiFi you offer customers. Better yet, it only costs around $50 a year.

2. Social WiFi

Social WiFi is a popular choice for management software. While it is a little pricier, at around $50 per month, those who want advanced software will appreciate it. Social WiFi has many details for collecting customer data, so it fits broader marketing strategies. If you want to incorporate your guest WiFi into a larger strategy, it’s a good choice.

3. Hownd

Hownd is a step up again, offering more finely tuned marketing preferences. However, it also provides an interesting policy, only charging once you get results ( e.g., a visiting customer or purchase). It specializes in sending targeted offer promotions via email.

Hownd is best for those who want a low-risk software investment. It’s also fantastic for those wanting to drive increased foot traffic.

Why Offer Guest WiFi?

You may want to avoid looking at a gift horse in the mouth if you’re a customer. If you get what you want (high-speed WiFi) why should you care why businesses offer it? But what about business owners? Why should you offer guest WiFi in your business, and why should you proactively manage it?

Overall, it is simple. Offering guest WiFi keeps customer satisfaction high. It also allows you to make use of WiFi marketing. If you want to grow your business, both of these are vital. However, here’s a more detailed breakdown of why you should offer guest WiFi at your company:

1. Guest WiFi Increases Customer Loyalty

Having guest WiFi increases customer loyalty by encouraging customers to return. This is especially true for solo diners (who may use WiFi as a social crutch). Equally, it’s popular amongst remote workers who are frequent in cafes. And it also makes the customer experience more enjoyable overall, increasing the likelihood of returning customers.

Having reliable WiFi creates a guest’s understanding that you’re a fantastic place to go for great service. You’d be surprised at how many people take WiFi into account when choosing somewhere to eat or shop.

2. Guest WiFi Enables Data Collection

Guest WiFi also lets you collect customer data through captive portals for marketing purposes. The portal prevents immediate wireless access until customers complete a web page form. This is fantastic for growing your business and funneling vital information into other strategies. If you want to grow your restaurant or cafe, collecting email addresses and phone numbers helps you invest later.

Consider data collection as watering a beanstalk — climbing to get the treasure later.

3. Guest WiFi Saves Your Time

Offering guest WiFi also saves you time. In an age where most customers expect WiFi, clearly offering WiFi limits WiFi-related conversations. Clearly display your WiFi and social login details. Then you don’t have to answer the same questions twenty times a day.

How To Link Guest WiFi to Captive Portals

As we mentioned earlier, one of the greatest benefits of guest WiFi is linking it to a captive portal. They prevent guests from fully accessing your internet until they fill out a form with details of your choice. This means you can request email addresses, phone numbers, and reviews.

The easiest way to link a guest network to them is to invest in singular software. The ideal software offers a captive portal feature. Then, you can use the in-built features and process to set one up.

Once you have the right software, setting up a captive portal is easy. You just need to enable certain options in your network settings.

Beambox: A Perfect Guest WiFi Solution

Here at Beambox, we offer precisely that. We have an ideal guest WiFi management solution for you.

Our all-in-one WiFi marketing system helps you fully get on top of your guest WiFi. With our help, you can create a guest network that benefits both parties — perfect, right?

At Beambox, internet marketing and captive portals are our bread and butter. We help businesses of all shapes and sizes build successful guest WiFi strategies.

Start your Beambox free trial today. When managing your guest WiFi, there’s no time to start like the present.

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