Smarter Check-in

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Aaron Hung

A smarter check-in not only enables superior customer service during the meet & greet process, it also provides better data quality and faster process improvement.

RFID & NFC

Hotels, hospitals and airlines, which normally meet and greet a huge base of customers, are heading to employee RFID and NFC, connecting with customer’s smartphones to enable a smoother and faster check-in.

Upon arrival of the airport, customers are allowed to check in at a kiosk, where frequent flyers are equipped with an RFID-enabled wireless bag tag, with detailed information which can then be sent to their phones.

Hotels are now enabling guests with NFC-equipped smartphones as room keys, or issuing RFID cards to customer for personalized services in TV, laundry or food service, activating in-room amenities. The presence will be detected automatically and followed with appropriate responses, make it effortless access to elevators, suite, gym or the parking garage. “Loyalty cards”, enabled by RFID or NFC-smartphone, provides a superior user experiences to bypass the front desk and have a greater and personalized control.

WE KNOW YOU ARE HERE!

- Facial Recognition, Digital Signage and Location Based Service

Does the facial check-in remind you Tom Cruise in the movie “Minority Report”, where software knows who you are and what you purchased a decade ago? Helpful or Horrible? There are some debates over the “Big Brother” implication where behaviometrics doesn’t just want to know where you are but what you are thinking by tracking facial movement. But, surely, with some of the technology enablers to your customer, as facial recognition, location-based technology to identifying when he/she arriving the spot, background check-in to know customer’s where about and push the discounts, marketing ads, personalized details, place specific recommendations directly to the customer.

Screened Interactions

Trends in check-in through interactive screens are becoming popular in restaurants, hotels, and hospitals, where menus, with personalized preferences and workers/service providers can be tailored on the fly, where self-help, more customer control, and better quality to propagate check-in data and faster process are providing customer with more engaging experiences. It also connects the customer to far more possibility to browse catalogs, to explore inventory in depth, and to archive the process to file case management for later track or analysis.

Tablet Enabled Services

Tablets have been growing so fast that they will be virtually “ubiquitous” in couple of years. There are some calls for tablet to replace paper to save money, to be friendly to the earth, and to be more efficient. Airline companies are trading the originally piled paper manuals, charts and checklists with iPads.

For commercial vehicles industry, it could be a very good fit to have tablet-enabled services in service workshops to enable service engineers with mobility for retrieving technical support and to be connected with the check-in process for a better data quality. Real-time access to the information via tablet can be enabled with the wireless transferring from the vehicle’s CAN-bus. Customized experiences for the truck drivers based on their needs become feasible. Tiers of service staffs, meet & greet, 1^st line and 2^nd line service engineers are connected to the vehicles and drivers with the handsets.

To explore quality and faster check-in for Volvo in Asia

We start to explore some possibilities around the meet & greet process aiming to provide faster and quality check-in for Volvo trucks drivers who are getting services at Volvo Trucks dealer – the Beijing Walker. With the available technology, we would experiment, learn and integrate “right” technologies for new ways to meet & greet the driver, to leverage the reservation to more planned services, wireless transferring vehicle check-in information to secure data quality, to connecting meet & greet to the later check-in process faster and explore new possibilities to provide mobility to service mechanics as well.

Even data is as simple as mileage information, sometimes it is not so easy to keep its consistency in the traditional manual check-in. If there is any discrepancy in mileage information, it creates problems for history capturing, R&D, service plan, quotation, new service control, and failure analysis. Data quality and faster process will be pursued in this Wireless Check-in prototype, and further superior user experiences could be built around in the future.