TechUK Public Service Innovation Week - What emerging and innovative technologies will be most important in transforming public service delivery?

For their Public Service Innovation Week, TechUK asked a selection of businesses to write contributing blogs discussing the future of Britain's public services. Looking at the role technology will play in the future of public service delivery we wrote the following blog. 

The public sector has been debilitated by the pandemic, but what’s next? Technology has come alive throughout restriction changes and has already made opening up that little bit easier for businesses, but as the phrase, ‘new normal’ is exhausted into cliché, we can begin to ask what tech can aid us in truly rebuilding our public sector and transforming the delivery of our public services? 

With many venues and public spaces having inadequate or underutilised WiFi, we don’t need to look much further than something that most venues already have as a given.  

WiFi is expected and is necessary for how we’ve come to live our lives. But WiFi is often underappreciated and can in fact provide so much more than just connectivity. Through two key innovations, WiFi can be actively used to re-establish a connection between venues and their visitors all whilst inspiring much-needed revenue back into British businesses.  

And the best part? These innovations supercharge something you already have, instead of having a technological overhaul and investing money into excessive infrastructure to improve services, businesses can learn a lot about their visitors and so much more just from an amplified WiFi provision. 

In 2021, WiFi is just a starting point. With a good system, you can build a unique and venue-branded User Experience (UX) portal. This is the gateway that greets visitors when they connect to the WiFi and it can collect information such as email addresses and telephone numbers to turn WiFi users into engaged customers. When opting into marketing, businesses have now been given permission to market directly to the user, singing the praises of special offers or letting them know key venue information. 

A bespoke UX can be added to WiFi anywhere, whether providing connectivity to a university campus or a hospital, key nuggets of information can be delivered to the user via a personalised UX and this small change elevates your WiFi offering and re-opens a conversation with your visitors without costing the world. 

Once you’ve established your brand identity through a punchy UX, you can continue to add value through the use of specialist analytics. Beloved in retail, specialist analytics work to track the movements of devices around estates. Gaining no personal information from the device, analytics can show key points of interest, measure footfall, dwell time and can be tailored to record information important to your business. All this information can inform data-educated decisions about store layouts, window displays and where to best target your customers to increase sales.  

Analytics uses WiFi as a base from which to make your venue respond to your visitors, welcoming them back into the public sphere in a way that puts them at the heart of business decisions. These catalysts for change are right under our noses waiting to change the way we experience the public sector, so what’s stopping them from being used everywhere?  

The emerging and innovative technologies that are going to transform public service delivery are already available to everyone, they just haven’t been tapped to their full potential yet. You don’t need to look further than your WiFi to transform how you provide for your visitors, whether it be creating a personalised UX to grab the attention of WiFi users or the implementation of smart analytics to learn about your visitors and inform your business decisions, each solution can be layered to fit a variety of budgets, engage with visitors and aid in selling your service to increase your return on WiFi investment.  

So why not supercharge your WiFi today? 

In 2021 WiFi should be giving you more than just connectivity, it should be working for you, and at WiFi SPARK that is our specialty. If you would like to find a solution that gives you more, download our Connect brochure by clicking the link below.