NPRO / AKER BRYGGE
Loyalty through technology.
Aker Brygge, situated by the harbor in Oslo, Norway — is one of Norway’s most attractive areas to work, shop and live. This is the story of NPRO - a commerical real estate company - and their bold journey to build a service for all the people with a relationship to Aker Brygge: a digital neighbour that knows the area and what is relevant for you.
This project is one of the first large scale commercial iBeacons project in Norway.
Every day approximately 12 000 people interacts with Aker Brygge — leaving for or coming to work, visiting to eat or shop, visiting an event or going to their boat by the harbour.
We have built the service for these people. With the goal of making it easy, fun and rewarding to visit and live at Aker Brygge. Eventually leading to increased revenue for all the commercial players on Aker Brygge.
Together with Carine Zeier, AITC, Llowbank and Geelmuyden Kiese, we have (at the point of writing) been working with the project for two years, with huge ambitions for the next years to come.
All photos by Johnny Vaet Nordskog
It is all about loyalty.
For NPRO, loyalty from their tenants — offices, restaurants and shops. For the shops and restaurants, loyalty from their customers.
Here are some of the initiatives created to build that loyalty - based on technology and service design.
Communication > Dialogue > Transaction > Relation
Communication
A new, personalized channel.
A rewarding, personalized stream.
Designed not only as a way to merge several sources into one interface, the stream is the interface for physical interaction (with iBeacons) when visiting the Aker Brygge area. Enabling preference to content from shops and restaurants nearby, as well as services such as transportation, weather and several art and historic sights in the area.
Built in the cloud.
Dialog
Your local, friendly assistant.
For all initiatives in the app, the core idea is to develop tools for the whole community of restaurants and offices. We want people visiting, working or living at Aker Brygge, to discover services they did not already know. To assist in this task, we created Concierge. A market place where user needs can meet great offers (from restaurants, shopping, services). The interface: a chat.
Some of the things you can do with Concierge…
When launching the Concierge service — Arnfinn, a long time business man at Aker Brygge
was hired as both a physical (with his own office) and digital operator of the Concierge.
The learnings from this first version of this traditional Concierge is the foundation for the natural next step: The Aker Brygge bot.
Two apps to rule them all.
To enable all the restaurants and shops to reach out to the users of the app, we created an own experience for them. A highly functional and efficient experience that allows for real time interactions — whether it is in the stream, through iBeacons, geofencing and push notifications.
Features includes product administration, order management, customer chat, user and account management and publishing (events, offers, articles) — to mention but a few. An important part of the project was training all employees, as well as documenting for future employees.
Transaction
Everyday value.
Fast track is a service for shops and restaurants to sell their products in the app, and for the user to pay with the app. You can order and skip the queue — something you might do everyday for your morning coffee on your way to work. The solution includes a backoffice solution to handle payments, inventory and more.
In-app payment.
Mobile payment was still at an early stage in Norway when the integration began within our app, but the potential is great for both the consumer users (save time, preorder “click and collect” etc) and the businesses (lower cut and fees than AmEx/Visa/MasterCard, ensure purchase in a shopping flow). First out is MobilePay from Danske Bank, and more will follow.
A two-track project
The two main target groups in this project are the commerical tenants and the office tenants. This first part of the project focuses on the commerical users (shop, restaurants). It early became apparent to us how the investments made in both infrastructure and tools will be relevant for both of the target groups. This made it easier for plan and budget a project that will run for a minimum of six years.
Some examples:
Commercial (in progress)
iBeacons
Offers, events, localized content
Mobile payment
Preorder and prepay
Direct dialogue
Ask a question - inititiate sales
Offices (next step)
iBeacons
Entry control, power control, etc
Mobile payment
Parking, lunch order and payment
Direct dialogue
Make client services more effective
80 iBeacons placed outside in the cold norwegian weather — at your service.
The first big scale iBeacons project in Norway.
This one, like with all new technology, was a challenge. Signal strength (varied from 100 to 15 meters based on temperature), presicion (installation high above the ground for safety reasons, required to set all beacons in “far mode” rather than “near” and “immediate”) and maintenance (no system to administer lifespan, theft or dead beacons) - to mention some.
Not only were all companies delivering iBeacon services at the time still in Beta, but none of the international players were challenging Apple’s idea of how it should be used (inside a shop with your phone on and open). None could deliver a service that could be integrated in native apps (all were html-based), all were built around offers and push (where we are using them often as wayfinding). In the end, the technical partner, AITC, built everything from scratch.
Relation
Customer Experience Management.
From CRM to CXM: Ultimately, the goal for NPRO was to increase long term loyalty and sales. Building a service that adapts to users preferences and traits. Eventually making it more appealing to have the shops, restaurant, office or apartment at Aker Brygge. We are proud to be working with a corporate real estate owner that has approach this challenge with holistic view, by creating a service that will generate loyalty towards their clients.
Learning from big data.
By monitoring traffic flow, commericial peaks and what initiatives creates the most effect, we will use the insight to identify quiet areas and plan how to make them grow, guide people (even in real time) to places they haven’t seen, help shops and restaurant identifying when they need more staff to be able to give good service.
Where does the project go from here?
The simple answer is:
as long as a service like this keeps creating financial value and loyalty, the development and improvement never ends.
