Social WiFi find great synergies with new partner in Indonesia

Background

Global Asia Sinergi (GAS) have been providing IT and Security services in Indonesia and Singapore for many years, serving small businesses and corporate businesses successfully. Their offering included many well-known brand services from which they are also Partners.

One of their corporate banking clients requested a WiFi solution that would help their marketing division engage with customers and boost cross-selling opportunities. As GAS did not have a product in its portfolio matching these specifications, they needed to find a partner that would support them.

Sim Bong, Director of Operations & Marketing for Global Asia Sinergi, had previously worked with Social WiFi on a project in New Zealand and contacted the Social WiFi team to establish if we could help.

The Challenge

Of course, a WiFi system to support Marketing is Social WiFi’s “bread and butter” offering, so this was not a challenge. The product was a right fit for the requirements of the end client. What was a challenge though was geography.

Indonesia is a country made up of thousands of islands and the client of GAS had a banking presence across the majority of the country. The deployment process of Social WiFi would need to be efficient and not require on site presence in order to create updates or troubleshoot problems in the future. One on site visit to deploy was the maximum that could realistically be afforded to the project.

The banking client of GAS also wanted to use the captured data in their own secured systems and not have to use the Social WiFi dashboard to manage customer data, marketing, and analytics. There would need to be a way for everything from Social WiFi to be visible in their own existing systems.

The Solution

GAS started establishing what equipment was implemented at the first 300 locations chosen for deployment. It became apparent that a lot of branches already had modern WiFi Access Points from Extreme Networks. Many branches didn’t have any supported equipment though.

For the branches with Extreme Networks, Social WiFi already had an existing integration on their systems, meaning that with remote access, these branches could be configured, managed and monitored remotely with zero on site presence needed.

Branches without compatible hardware were supplied with MikroTik routers that connected to the existing internet network via ethernet cable. The was the most cost-effective way to deliver a WiFi Marketing service to these branches, though some on site visits were needed.

To serve the end client with all the data output from Social WiFi in a manner that they wished, the completion and release of the Social WiFi API was accelerated. Social WiFi already had an openAPI in development and testing, but with the need of GAS’s client so pressing, a decision was made to prioritise this development so that there was no delay in the client realising the benefits of their implementation and speed up the roll out to more branches.

The Result

With the technical team of GAS being so proficient with IT Networking, there were no problems in them learning how to implement Social WiFi at their clients’ locations. Because all vendor implementations are documented, GAS were able to follow Social WiFi guides to deliver the service. This ability to not rely on Social WiFi support strengthened the relationship between the companies and quickly they became self-reliant.

In the three months that followed, 300 bank branches were deployed by the team and their client used the Social WiFi API to write their own connections and feed data to their own systems.

In the first 12 months of the implementations, over 900,000 users connected to Social WiFi and all the data was seamlessly passed to their client. These numbers also account for the fact that there were coronavirus restrictions limiting the number of people permitted to use branches throughout the year.