Eighty-five percent of people rely on smartphones for doing business, which means that businesses need a reliable enterprise WiFi supplier. Not only this, but over 60 percent of business owners have said that without wireless solutions they wouldn’t be able to survive, which shows the importance of good quality WiFi.

Here are some enterprise wifi best practices that you should follow when deciding on the perfect enterprise WiFi supplier. It’s an important decision to make and one that mustn’t be taken lightly.

• Resilient Hardware to Support Users
• Scalability
• Centrally Managed Solution
• Reliability
• Package Costs and Speeds
• Analytics

Resilient Hardware to Support Users

Enterprise WiFi is designed to be used by multiple people at once, so they’ve got to be able to access it from their smartphones and other devices all at the same time. Your WiFi presents an opportunity to offer your visitors a fantastic service, so by having high quality hardware, you’re not restricting the service offering.

Poor equipment would make for terrible service and would probably be enough to turn people away from connecting to your WiFi and possibly from your retail space and brand as a whole. After all, 82 percent of shoppers research products online before shopping in a brick and mortar store. So, if they can’t access their web pages in-store to find the products they’ve researched, they’re more likely to leave the store empty handed.  A resilient network also impacts staff and other users, so ensuring a solution is capable to meet the needs of many different user types is essential.

Scalability

Whatever industry you specialise in or format your business is organised in, your WiFi has to be scalable. Whether it’s new employees, more visitors in-store or analytics platforms being able to cope with larger volumes of traffic, it has to have the potential to keep up with your business as it grows.

To cope with future changes, we recommend working in a proactive fashion and anticipating changes that you feel are likely to happen. Draw out a plan of how you expect the business to grow and your supplier should be able to recommend a suitable  network architecture that will allow your deployment to scale and flex with your business needs.

Centrally Managed Solution

The easiest way to manage and control your solutionis by having one central place that looks after the different hotspots or network types you may have. This reduces the chance of any complications because there aren't multiple control locations and systems.

A cloud-based management solution is the most efficient way of managing your WiFi solution and by having networks centrally hosted, any changes, updates and security patches can be applied more effectively. It is also a means of monitoring and managing the solution from one place - avoiding time wastage and room for error.

Reliability

There’s nothing more frustrating than slow, unreliable WiFi. Your visitors won't want to be standing at the front of a queue waiting for a discount code to load to reveal it at the checkout. Nor will they want to be encountering the dreaded buffering circle over and over.

So, you need to make sure that you can rely upon your enterprise WiFi supplier for a stable, high quality service.

It's not just the connection that we're talking about. We mean the equipment too. You don’t want to have to constantly be paying for equipment maintenance costs, especially having invested heavily in it in the first place. You need equipment that is made to last and that can cope with the heaviest traffic and demand, but that won't be end of life or outdated anytime soon. This may cost that bit extra, but it will save you time and money long term.

Package Costs and Speeds

When choosing a supplier, a big deciding factor is the price. We can see why as you obviously want to stay on budget, but we don’t believe that this should be the ultimate decision maker or breaker. Just because something is expensive, doesn’t mean that you’re going to receive the full experience that you expect.

Likewise, if a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. Speed is another huge factor when deciding on your supplier. Are you receiving the right speed for what you’re paying for?

At WiFi SPARK, we have solutions and packages that are designed to help all different business sizes.

To find out more, or to receive a live quote from one of our expert team, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Analytics

WiFi analytics can be a business’ best friend - if used correctly, that is. Companies  can make use of the analytics tool brilliantly to make better-informed business decisions. Using measured data of footfall, habits and behaviour, businesses are more empowered to make decisions that will help them become more efficient and effective.

SPARK® Analytics offers comprehensive insight into how your guest users behave and is particularly targeted towards customer-facing industries.  Included in every managed service is:

• Portal views vs Registrations and validations.
• New vs returning users.
• Device type, operating system and browser.
• User origin.
• User marketing preferences.
• Session lengths and amount of data transferred.

Choose the Right Supplier with WiFi SPARK

As technology has evolved, the dependence of everyday people and businesses on WiFi has grown massively too. So, when choosing your enterprise WiFi solution and supplier, you shouldn’t jump at the first attractive offer. It’s a decision that needs a lot of thought and one that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

WiFi can benefit your business in various ways, whether it’s through in-depth analytics or increasing your customer engagement levels to boost sales. It’s all possible with the packages and service provided by WiFi SPARK.

If you would like to read more about how you can improve customer interactions and increase brand loyalty, download our free all-in-one guide below.