A digital wayfinding signage is an interactive self-service kiosk that enables dynamic wayfinding. It is a computer terminal with interactive maps, guides, information, and multimedia specifically designed to help customers and visitors navigate through a building or a large area. Usually, the reception is not the only place where your visitors and customers need to go. In fact, they may need to visit many different places within your premises. Not all businesses have enough staff to escort each individual customer and visitor, which is why they use digital wayfinding signage to help their customers and visitors easily navigate through the premises. Static wayfinding signage is not interactive.
These signs are typically made of paper, acrylic, or are engraved or etched onto a surface. Digital wayfinding signage, on the other hand, is an interactive self-service kiosk that can offer a great customer experience by providing a lot more details and intuitive navigation. The question is whether your business needs digital wayfinding signage or not. Do you have a large building in your office or business? Do your customers need to visit other places within your premises besides the reception area? If you answered yes to both of these questions, then your business needs an interactive self-service digital wayfinding signage.
What are the advantages of Digital wayfinding Signage?
What is a Digital Wayfinding Signage?
A digital wayfinding signage is a computer-powered interactive self-service kiosk that offers interactive maps, up-to-date information, and the ability to search the premises to help customers and visitors easily find the office, person, or location they want to visit. Digital wayfinding signage is typically designed with large interactive touch screens and is used indoors. However, businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE are also deploying them in large outdoor facilities, venues, and entertainment parks. When visitors have to wait in line and then are unable to find their destination, it can be a frustrating experience.
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Digital wayfinding signage is a great tool to improve customer journey and ensure a satisfactory customer experience. Modern digital wayfinding signage has a smart search feature that allows users to apply filters, use advanced search features, and voice search. This makes them more user-friendly and helps to improve user interaction. Businesses can use the native signage management tool to publish content, run promotions, and post ads on digital wayfinding signage to leverage its maximum potential.
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What is a Digital Wayfinding Signage?
Advantages of Digital Wayfinding Signage
There digital wayfinding signage not only help customers and visitors but also improve your brand image. When your customers and visitors will find a digital signage they will get a very positive impression and admire the simplicity and convenience of digital interaction. Here are some main advantages of implementing a digital wayfinding signage at your facility:
- Enhance Customer Experience: It is always frustrating to navigate through large buildings and multi-story facilities. It is difficult for the new customers and visitors to find the way to their destination. Even the frequent customers tend to forget the way. That is why a digital wayfinding signage can be very helpful for the customers and visitors. They can easily find the way to their destination. Which enhance customer experience and help improving brand image.
- Optimize Human Resource: Most of the time of your reception staff or service agents is wasted by giving directions and sometime escorting customers to the required place. When you implement a digital wayfinding signage you can easily free up your staff and let them focus on more important and productive tasks.
- Instant Floor Plan Updates: It is very common in a business environment that the floor plans keep changing, with printed floor plans, it incurs a repeated cost and waste of resources. With digital wayfinding signage you can instantly update floor plan, change the name of people, locations, and even routes for any destination. The digital wayfinding signage comes with a management tool which allow management to make changes from a web-based control panel and it reflect all those changes instantly on all connected digital wayfinding signage.
- Amaze Your Customer with Virtual Tours: The virtual tours are gaining huge popularity. Businesses are developing virtual tours and providing them through digital wayfinding signage and online portals. This help your customers and visitors to get familiar with your facility before even stepping foot into it. It is a great way to build a positive impression on your customers and gain their trust and loyalty.
- Utilize Multiple Channels: The digital wayfinding signage are a great way to help your customers and visitors to navigate your premises. You can integrate multiple platforms such as Google Maps, Smartphone Apps, QR Codes, etc. Your users can easily scan a QR code and get the route in their smartphones and they can use Google Maps too which can greatly improve their experience.
- Get Customers’ Attentions: The digital wayfinding signage features a bright flashy screen which displays eye-catchy layouts and designs which naturally attract attentions of customers and passing by visitors. Businesses can provide other information, such as promotions, marketing material, products/services, etc. to get customers’ attention and generate more leads.
- Enhanced Branding: The digital wayfinding signage are built on a very flexible management software tool which help businesses to customize the screens as per their needs. They can use their own custom branding colors, design patterns and theme to enforce their branding. The wayfinding signage also comes in all colors and different shapes where businesses can put their logo, brand message or customized design to improve their branding.
- Third-party Integration: The digital wayfinding signage features easy third-party integration via APIs and other convenient ways which help businesses make the user experience more personalized and inclusive. Businesses can integrate it with central information center or multiple third-party business management tools to provide additional information such as availability of the staff the customer is trying to meet, the change in appointment timings, and even the entire contact book can be integrated to provide users more information they might need.
- Cost-Effective Solution: The digital wayfinding signage doesn’t have much cost, they require very less maintenance and have a long lifecycle which make them very cost-effective solution and have excellent ROI. Businesses can also offer more functionalities along with wayfinding and even the entire wayfinding signage can be repurposed if needed.
- Useful in Emergency Situations: The digital wayfinding signage can be configured to respond to emergency situations and help customers and visitors by displaying instructions and route to nearest and safest exits. This functionality can be control by automatic triggers and integration with emergency systems or manually from the administrative control panel which make them very useful in the emergency situations.
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Digital wayfinding signage are a very flexible and customizable solutions which can be customized according to business needs which make them more useful and can help businesses greatly enhance customer experience.
Advantages of Digital Wayfinding Signage
Customized Digital Wayfinding Signage
The digital wayfinding signage can customized as per business needs. The customized digital wayfinding signage can be very beneficial for the businesses and customers. You should considering asking yourself some basic questions such as:
- What people want to find?
- What information can be helpful for your visitors?
- What type of interaction could be satisfactory for visitors?
- Do you need a multi-lingual interface and information system?
- Do you need a 2D non-interactive map, or do you need a 3D interactive map?
- Do you need to offer virtual tour, will it help?
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These questions will help you to set a layout of the informational structure and navigation. People would want to get the contact details of the officer they want to meet which is currently unavailable. People might want to see the landmark photos and such details which help them navigating through the route. If you have a more complex and multi-story facility where a lot of stairs or lifts are involved, you should offer users a 3D map with ability to zoom in or out and highlight landmarks which can help them staying on the course and so on. There are a lot of things that you can offer.
You can also ask yourself what kind of content you should put on the signage display, for example, you can publish marketing content, news and much more to improve customer experience. The orientation and size of the screen is most important especially when you are offering 2D maps. The QR Tags and ability to push route/maps to the users’ mobile phone is very helpful, especially in case of large floor plans. There are several features which can help you achieve a better and more satisfactory customer experience that is why customized digital wayfinding signage are much better than any off-the-shelf solution.
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Customized Digital Wayfinding Signage
Conclusion
The interactive digital wayfinding signage are a great way to improve your customers’ experience. It help optimizing the customer flow and also improve your staff’s productivity. There are several way to implement a digital wayfinding signage. When your customers and visitors are unable to find the route to their destination and they will have to keep asking the staff, they will get annoyed and frustrated. The customer frustration have huge impact on the service quality and their overall experience. It also have negative impact on your brand image. A digital wayfinding signage is a quick and convenient way to navigate through large premises and buildings.
Businesses like offices, government facilities, warehouses, shopping malls, hospitals, educational institutes, and other large facilities must have a well-crafted wayfinding solution at place to ensure your customers never get lost. Confusion among customers will directly reflect at satisfaction index which has huge impact on the overall growth and stability of the business. In this blog we have covered the basics of the digital wayfinding signage, if you want to learn more about the subject or if you want our help to design a tailor-made digital wayfinding signage solution for your business, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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