How Carmila uses Cloud4Wi to strengthen customer relationships

Carmila is the third-largest retail property company in Continental Europe, with 215 shopping centers and retail parks across France, Italy, and Spain. A leading player in Europe’s commercial property market, Carmila has more than 6,280 retail partners and 87% of its shopping centers are leaders or joint leaders. As of December 2018, the company’s portfolio was valued at 6.4 Mds €.

As one of Europe’s leading retail property companies, Carmila knew that it needed to offer next-level customer experiences to stay competitive.

The company was aware of the rising expectations of customers when they visit retailers and shopping centers. Today’s shoppers don’t just head to malls because they want to buy something; they do it because they want to be entertained, attend events, and connect with the community.

As such, Carmila wanted to ensure that customers have excellent experiences in its properties. The company wanted to offer the best WiFi services to customers and make them feel at home.

In the same vein, Carmila needed a cutting-edge solution for the brands that operated stores in its properties, so that retailers could market to shoppers more effectively.

On the hardware side, Carmila chose a cloud-based solution from Cisco Meraki because it specialized in hassle-free deployments for companies with lean IT.

On the software side, Carmila sought a partner that could meet the needs of the company and its customers. Carmila analyzed various solutions in the market, and ultimately decided to go with Cloud4Wi.

Carmila was impressed with Cloud4Wi’s ability to gather and extract valuable customer insights from Cisco Meraki access points. This enabled Carmila to unlock numerous use cases for the brands that operated in its shopping centers.

What’s more, Cloud4Wi’s intuitive dashboard allowed the team to get up and running quickly. The dashboard gave the company an at-a-glance view of the data and tools that it needed, so the Carmila team could extract actionable insights quickly and easily.

Carmila adopted a systematic approach to launching Cloud4Wi. The company started by defining the best practices in one country, and then applied them to other locations.

In the summer of 2017, Carmila deployed Cloud4Wi across 124 locations in France. Two years later, the company implemented Cloud4Wi in 25 locations in Spain.

Executing guest WiFi was easy, and Cloud4Wi’s application suite allowed Carmila to customize its splash pages for the different locations. In addition to tailoring the look and feel of these splash pages, Carmila also localized the language of each one.

Plus, Carmila was able to give customers various ways to log in — including Facebook and email sign up. This helped increase Carmila’s opt-in rate because customers had the ability to choose the login option they were most comfortable with. More importantly, everything was done in compliance with GDPR, thus ensuring that Carmila stayed on the right side of privacy regulations.

Carmila also used email validation to ensure that the customer details it collected were legit and ready-to-use for marketing campaigns.

The company saw excellent results upon deploying Cloud4Wi. Some notable KPIs include:

• 29,000+ opted-in contacts per month
• 88% opt-in ratio

In addition to growing its database, Carmila also leveraged Cloud4Wi to understand how customers behaved in its locations. Using Cloud4Wi’s analytics, Carmila was able to gain insights into where customers went, how long they stayed in a particular area, as well as how often they came back.

This allowed Carmila to build detailed customer profiles, which were then fed into Cheetah, the company’s digital customer engagement suite. In doing so, the company was able to create 360-degree customer profiles, which comprised of data coming from multiple sources (e.g., WiFi and online games).

The unified customer view enabled Carmila to offer data-driven marketing services to its brand partners. Thanks to the in-depth knowledge it has about customers, Carmila — along with the brands that operate in its locations — can create personalized messages, boost engagement, and drive conversions.

Carmila’s data-gathering efforts proved immensely useful amidst COVID-19. During the pandemic period and lockdown, Carmila leveraged data it had already collected to stay in touch with customers.

Thanks to Cloud4Wi, Carmila had the ability to send timely messages that were relevant to each customer, thus strengthening their relationships and ensuring that the brand stays top of mind during and after the lockdown.

Going forward, Carmila plans to implement Cloud4Wi in an additional 30 locations in Spain, plus a few more properties in Italy. The company also wants to create a unified experience across all its locations, so both brands and shoppers can have a much better WiFi experience.

In terms of customer engagement, Carmila intends to further leverage the data it collects (i.e., shopper demographics and behavioral insights) to help marketing teams run more targeted and personalized campaigns. In doing so, shoppers can get messages, offers, and coupons that are relevant to their preferences and needs.