Purple, the intelligent spaces company, and Cisco have helped Cleveland Metroparks to become cleverly connected, enabling visitors to access a seamless WiFi network whilst capturing valuable data about their target audiences.
Cleveland Metroparks boasts more than 300 miles of trails, eight golf courses, eight lakefront parks and a nationally-acclaimed zoo. Public WiFi was already available across more than 23,000-acres of the site, but the team felt the system delivered a minimal return. The platform was extremely basic and captured no form of information about their thousands of guests. They sought a solution that would be easy to integrate and manage, but would also allow them to learn more about visitors.
Purple and Cisco joined forces in early 2017 to meet the organization’s core requirements. With Purple, Cleveland Metroparks can now deliver fast, free WiFi to visitors whilst simultaneously capturing data, including the WiFi users name, email address, age, interests, visitor location and frequency of visits. Purple’s location services will also allow Cleveland Metroparks to monitor the movement of guests and other behaviors, dwell times, busiest zones and where people visit on site.
Commenting on the decision to install Purple, Anthony Joy, Chief Information Officer for Cleveland Metroparks, said: “We looked at several other providers but their platforms appeared very basic, some even required custom building. With Purple, the solution integrated well with our Cisco hardware and it provides us with an in-depth insight into our visitors, which is something we’ve not really had before.”
WiFi is now accessible in a total of 20 zones and the most popular on-site venue is Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, which makes up 65% of the entire network traffic. In just under six months Cleveland Metroparks has collected 21,180 lines of customer data in the Purple portal, which is a significant benefit for the customer due to the fact they had a very limited customer database.
Anthony adds: “It has been really interesting to learn about the type of individuals that actually visit Cleveland Metroparks. The installation of Location Services will be particularly interesting as it will help us to go the extra mile with customer engagement. We’ll be able to analyse data about demographic and location to help us to determine what new educational programmes we should launch, where to place new food kiosks and where best to allocate staff members.”
The on-site marketing team has been particularly impressed with the results achieved so far and are able to export all of the demographic data for email marketing purposes. Once Purple’s location services have been activated, Cleveland Metroparks will use the analytics to identify traffic patterns, adjust hours of operation and staffing strategies going forward, thus improving business efficiency. There are also plans to utilise Purple’s Micro Surveys feature as employees currently distribute paper surveys on-site and the team wants to replace this with a digital process to make data capture easier, save valuable time and prevent human error.
Commenting on the installation of Purple at Cleveland Metroparks, Gavin Wheeldon, CEO of Purple, said: “It’s great to know that Purple was deemed the best fit for Cleveland Metroparks in terms of management and delivering detailed visitor insights. The on-site marketing team can now effectively engage with their visitors, identify key zones and attractions, obtain guest feedback and essentially grow visitor numbers and profits going forward. With some exciting plans in the pipeline, it will be interesting to see what they achieve further down the line.”