21 February, 2012

Your WiFi Network and Your Customers

How many times has this happened to you? You sit down in a restaurant, whip out your iPhone and try to log on to the network titled, say, "Joe's Restaurant" only to be rebuffed for lack of a password?



OK, how many times have you bothered to ask for that password? How many times have you been told, when you asked, that either they don't have a network or that it's not for customer use?

There are a lot of reasons to have a WiFi network in your business. First and foremost amongst them is to help you conduct business, using it to connect your back office systems, printers, registers and the like without the installation of hard wiring. It makes sense that if you're using your network to support your business tools, you don't want customers or others accessing your network.

But, as more and more people utilize devices with WiFi capabilities, such as smartphones and tablets, those networks that you've created to serve your business needs become visible to your customers and visitors. Rightly or not, once your customers know you have a network, they're going to expect to be able to utilize that network. If you fail to provide a service that customers receive from at least some of your competitors and your customers know that it is possible for you to provide that service, you've created an unmet need amongst your customers. Unmet needs lead to dissatisfaction and, over the long haul, can significantly hurt your business.

So, what should you do? Should you offer up your network to your customers? Should you share your potentially finite or costly internet bandwidth?The answers depend on factors that are unique to you and your business.

If you're only using your network to access the internet and you have sufficient bandwidth to share, then share away. Make sure that your computers and devices on the network have firewalls to protect them from intrusions. If you're in an area with other businesses nearby, utilize a password system to ensure that use of the system is limited to your customers and not to your neighbors and their customers. Even though slow connection speeds can frustrate you, your customers will likely give you a pass for problems, cognizant that it's something beyond your control (if they even notice).

If you need your network to be secure and completely private, you have other options. First, you can add another wireless router to your network, attaching it to your existing router. Set up your first router (or cable/dsl modem, if it has a built in WiFi router) to be open and then add the second router after the first, making it protected and available only to your devices. Name you first network (the open one) something like "Joe's Restaurant - Guest". For the other, private, network, follow the steps below.

If you can't or don't want to provide network access to your customers (such as closing off your private business network), you have a couple of options. The cleanest is to turn off SSID broadcast for your network. Although you can still connect devices to the network and it will run normally, customers' devices won't "see" the network and, therefore, they won't know you even have one. The downside to this is that you'll need to manually enter your network information into your devices to connect them, which means more work for you on the front end.

Another option is to give your network a name that doesn't create a false expectation amongst your customers. "Joe's Restaurant" leaves no doubt as to whose network customers are seeing. On the other hand, "DFF-63LK-Secure" could be anything. Customers seeing this have no idea whether this is your network or not, thus it doesn't create that perception of an unmet need.

Whether you take these thoughts to heart or not, know that your customers are judging you on them. Their perceptions are your reality. Embrace that or suffer the consequences.


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Richard Mendell is a marketing expert with more than 15 years of customer marketing and brand management experience in the restaurant industry. He is currently consulting for restaurant, retail and CPG clients in the Oklahoma City market, but is open to long term marketing roles throughout the United States.