Business Success Story: Smartac Enables Mobile Retail Transformation for Link City Shopping Center

The Company

Smartac

Smartac Group China Holdings (Smartac) is responsible for the installation, post-installation maintenance and provision of operation service of Wi-Fi systems in more than 400 railway stations operated by Guangzhou Railway (Group) Corporation, Beijing Railway Administration and Lanzhou Railway Administration. In addition, the company provides software and online-to-offline (O2O) solutions that combine wireless technology and social network platforms.

The Client

Link City Shopping Mall in Suzhou, China, provides a luxury one-stop shop­ping experience that including retail, dining, leisure, entertainment and community service. The shopping center, which has more than 1.6 million square feet of floor space across six stories, is home to a variety of major local and western brands including Sam’s Club, H&M and many others. The facility includes more than 50 restaurants and a cinema complex, as well as an indoor theme park that covers more than 107,000 square feet.

The Challenge

With rise of e-commerce and digital retail, Link City and shopping centers like it are asking how technology can be leveraged to attract and retain mobile visitors.

To enhance shopper’s experience, Link City decided to pursue a complete digital retail transformation that included social net­working, interactive digital signage and branded mobile applica­tions. To support this, Link City also needed to modernize its Wi-Fi infrastructure to facilitate engagement while customers were on-site. In doing so, Link City’s objective was to change Wi-Fi from being a “nice to have” amenity to a business-centric and sales-de­pendent capability. Through this effort, Link City expected to dra­matically improve traffic and sales for shop owners and brands, while providing a more personalized and intimate experience for every shopper.{ad}

To lead the digital transformation, Link City partnered with Smartac.

The Solution

After an extensive selection process, Smartac chose Relay2 for the Link City deployment. The selection was driven by Relay2’s robust Wi-Fi performance, ease of deployment and management, and platform openness to facilitate the integration of value-added capabilities including indoor location-based services.

Smartac deployed a total of …

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… 150 Relay2 Service-Ready Access Points across the shopping mall. These provide robust high-per­formance coverage of the entire mall including shops, indoor atri­ums, dining areas, parking lots and offices. Leveraging advanced inter-AP coordination, the solution supports dynamic power control and load balance functions to provide reliable and stable wireless connections, even under high-density access scenarios, such as popular marketing promotion events in the atrium or during high-traffic festival and sale days.

The plug-and-play nature of the access points and low-complexi­ty cloud-based architecture facilitated a streamlined deployment of the network that was completed in less than three weeks. The architecture also provided flexibility and scalability. The Wi-Fi network can quickly be reconfigured to adjust when merchants change or relo­cate. During temporary events, additional infrastructure can easily be added. In addition, the Relay2 cloud-based architecture and management has simplified IT management by providing unified network and service management anytime, anywhere and with tiered access rights for both Smartac and Link City.

Relay2’s Mobile Application Service Engine (MASE) provides an open platform to allow Smartac to build, deploy and manage retail-centric mobile services integrated with the Wi-Fi network. Relay2 worked closely with Smartac and Link City to un­derstand the stages of the consumer experience from store entry, browsing, trying, interacting with staff, to purchase completion. Understanding these, a definition was created for how the network and network data could be integrated to create rich connected shopping experiences leveraging the Relay2 platform to build edge applications. In this effort, the main function and value prop­ositions of the Relay2 platform were:

• Multiple authentication methods. Support for variety of authen­tication methods including by SMS, QR code scan, single click within mobile application, etc. This provides a convenient and mobile-friendly means to connect to Internet.
• Location and context awareness. Client data collected via the Wi-Fi network, including location and Web traffic information, is available for integration to create complete digital retail solu­tions such as client-aware interactive digital signage or mobile app location event triggering.
• Big data analysis. Data collected by the Wi-Fi network can be used to discern insights such as foot traffic volume, frequent routes, dwell-time, high-traffic areas, etc., all of which are helpful for merchants to make adjustments such as product placement and display to improve sale efficiency. Client and network sta­tistics can be integrated via API for analysis and visualization.
• HTML insertion. Promotions and notifications can be displayed via …

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… mobile browsers overlays to enhance business interaction with customers and generate more sales leads within store. Based on network-provided location and client data, inserted HTML content can be targeted. For example, geo-fencing can be used to trigger promotion in specific areas.

• Web cache/Web portal. Optimize the online mobile experience throughout Link City by providing ultra-low latency access to high-value as well as popular Web content. By caching merchant sites, mobile video and other rich media, merchants can create an “endless-aisle” shopping experience promoting both in-store and online-only products.  

The Results

While providing visitors with reliable high-speed wireless coverage throughout Link City, the Wi-Fi has also enabled Smartac to roll out capabilities that create a seamless online to on-site digital experiences for mobile shoppers. This includes social media campaigns that encourage shoppers to visit partner stores. Smart interactive screens throughout the mall provide store information, maps, events, advertisements and coupons. The screens also allow interaction via mobile phones so that shoppers can partici­pate in sales promotion, events and games.

Furthermore, Smartac was able to provide key business insights to Link City management by using the Wi-Fi to collect consumers’ location information so that mall managers could understand consumer behaviors and traffic distribution in the mall in real time.

Looking ahead, Smartac can further leverage the built-in pro­cessing, storage and services of the deployed Service-Ready Access Points and open MASE platform to build and deploy more advanced retail solutions that provide an increased degree of personalization and convenience to mobile shoppers. Addition­ally, the deployed access points support Relay2’s patent-pending Managed Virtual Access Point (MVAP) capability. This enables Smartac and Link City to offer merchants Wi-Fi amenity services in the form of their own branded and individually managed net­work by virtualizing the deployed Wi-Fi access point infrastructure.

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