We’ve already reported on projects built with Estimote Beacons to help restaurants and other small and medium businesses create new digital experiences and directly engage with customers in places like the mighty Silicon Valley and Toronto. Now we’re proud to see this trend expand to Europe, with the Experience Design Group bringing it to Londoners in the district of Peckham.
The Experience Design Group, or the XDs, is a collective of mixed discipline innovators interested in one thing: creating more meaningful, emotionally satisfying experiences for customers. On their first project - one designed around creating a better loyalty experience and using iBeacon technology - they teamed up with Peckham Refreshment Rooms, a restaurant known for its strong ties with the Peckham food, drink, arts and creative community. Together they asked customers and local merchants to co-design and take part in the pilot of a new and much more personalised loyalty experience. For example, if a customer has an interest in movies, as they walked into the restaurant or were eating there, they’d get film-related content pushed to their phones via Estimote’s Beacons. Content might include trailers and a list of what was playing in the local theatres, local tidbits of information about local film-making talent and local film history. They could even use the new loyalty currency the XDs created - the ‘Peckham Pound’ - and redeem it in the theater too.
We wanted to create an amazing customer experience based around loyalty - one driven by psychological insight about users and which combined different types of tech, including Estimote's iBeacons. We pretty much got there! says Alex Barclay, Strategist and XDs founder.
The pilot went so well, that The XDs are constantly bringing more people from Peckham on board. The grand vision is a hyper-local network of merchants, with an opportunity to benefit from each other. Within their ecosystem, merchants are able to upload content – e.g. menus, local events, new dishes and deals, and via an app interface, customers can get the best of everything in the area and share the content. That’s an incredible example of how even small communities can benefit from contextual computing.