How do you know if your business needs an indoor navigation solution?
Indoor navigation is becoming more and more important, but what exactly is it, why are so many businesses investing in it, and do your business need it too? In this blog, we'll guide you to five signs that show if your business needs an indoor navigation solution. If you want to know more about indoor navigation before we start, check out our blog 'The Ultimate Guide to Indoor Navigation'.
1. People get lost in your venue
Not all large buildings are hard to navigate in. In some buildings, finding the way from A to B is quite self-evident. In other buildings, wayfinding is only self-evident to the ones who frequent them on a regular basis and know the way by heart - but for visitors, who are unfamiliar with the layout of your building, finding the right way can be confusing. If people get lost or generally need to ask for directions, it’s a good sign that your venue will benefit from an indoor navigation solution.
There are a few reasons why people getting lost in your venue is bad for your business. Firstly, people who get lost are likely to cause delays by arriving late. Delays equals waste of time, which equals waste of resources. Secondly, people who ask for directions are often interrupting the person they’re asking, and studies show that frequent interruptions are a real productivity killer. And thirdly, being lost at a new place is a stressful experience, especially if it means that you’ll be late. These points are the same for all large venues - whether it’s a large corporate office with visitors and new employees or a university with freshman students. If you offer visitors an indoor navigation solution, you can reduce time waste, interruptions, and stress levels. And save money!
2. People don’t go where you want them to go
Sometimes, the problem isn’t that people are getting lost in your building, but that they go to places, you don’t want them to. And ignore the places you want them to go to.
A classic example is the line to the (let’s face it: ladies’) restroom. A huge line forms outside one restroom while another nearby restroom remains absolutely empty. Same story with the hot dog stand at the stadium, the cantina at the university, the meeting room at the corporate office, and the gate that was moved at the last minute at the airport. With an indoor navigation solution, people can easily get an overview of your facilities and find a nearby alternative. If you combine your indoor navigation solution with an indoor positioning system, you can send location-based push notifications to your visitors to give them valuable information about your venue and guide them to the right places. You can even interface your wayfinding solution with your queue management solution and give users waiting time information right there on the map.
A combination of indoor navigation and indoor positioning also gives you valuable insights, like people flow information, that you can use to optimize your suggested routing, emergency guidelines, or even the layout of your venue.
3. You have unutilized space
Unutilized space is money down the drain.
Corporate offices are a good example of this issue: As we see more of an emphasis on health, work/life balance, smart cities, and integrated technologies, and as a new generation starts to fill up our workforce, it is not surprising to see that the way we work is changing to be more flexible.
In 2018, an average of 2 out of 3 employees around the world worked away from the office at least once a week. For offices where each employee has their own working space. It is estimated that the cost for one workstation in one calendar year can be as much as $18,000. With 70% of people working remotely at least once a week, most desks are left unused 20% of the time. Using these numbers, a company with 1000 employees spends up to a whopping $2.520.000 a year on unutilized office space. However, Global Workplace Analytics predicts that 25-30% of the workforce will work from home on a multiple-days-a-week basis by the end of 2021, meaning that flexibility may soon come at an even higher cost for businesses.
With an open floor plan and a hot-desking solution featuring indoor navigation, you can save a lot of money by ensuring that employees can book desks and be guided directly to them. And it’s not just an issue in corporate offices. Being able to book and be guided to desks and meeting rooms is actually applicable to a lot of different industries. Talk to us about your ideas!
Convention centers can also use people movement insights to optimize floor plans and fill out the trade fair area properly.
4. You need a flexible platform
A good indoor navigation platform is easy to integrate with other third-party systems such as facility management, queue management, asset tracking, etc.. This allows you to create an indoor navigation solution that matches your exact needs.
MapsIndoors is an indoor navigation platform that integrates easily with almost any third-party system and it comes with a highly customizable CMS. MapsIndoors is intuitively built and doesn’t require any programming skills. You can add and edit photos and info boxes, drag and drop points of interest and change descriptions, and customize colors, icons, and route styles - and you can do it from anywhere in the world, instantly updating the maps of all users.
Many venues aren’t static. Rooms, stores, stands, opening hours, etc. often change, leaving your traditional paper maps outdated very fast. You need a solution as dynamic and flexible as your layout.
5. You have multiple large buildings
In some industries, one building simply isn’t enough. They need a whole campus! Universities, corporate offices, and hospitals often have buildings spread over large areas. So how do you navigate between buildings?
MapsIndoors is built with Google Maps which ensures seamless navigation indoors and outdoors. That means that you can guide people from a room inside one building all the way to a room inside another building in one app. That’s convenient for your users who won’t have to change between apps to find their way. It also means that your users will probably be familiar with the interface and functionality of the navigation in your app since they already know it from Google Maps.
If you want to know more about MapsIndoors and its possibilities, reach out to one of our salespersons for a chat about your venue and your needs.
June 12, 2019
