*customer name withheld due to NDA
A global, market-leading coffee company that has outlets throughout the UK is introducing a way to digitally capture customer details as they enter the store, in line with guidelines from the UK Government to help tackle COVID-19.
The UK Government has asked organisations in sectors like hospitality, leisure, local authorities and places of worship to assist the NHS Test and Trace programme by keeping a temporary record of customers and visitors for 21 days. This will help the NHS Test and Trace with requests for the data if required, which will help to contain clusters or outbreaks of the virus.
WiFi SPARK launched its WiFi Track & Trace solution in line with the new requirement from the UK Government at the beginning of July 2020. In the rush to reopen, many pubs, restaurants and cafes are capturing data manually, which is problematic for a number of reasons.
Capturing data using paper and pen is time-consuming, requires a close conversation between a member of staff and the public and runs the risk of capturing incorrect information. The test and trace initiative will only work if members of the public willingly engage with it, but they are unlikely to want to use a pen and paper that has been held by many people before them. Any barriers to people engaging with the initiative, like these, run the risk that the entire programme will be less effective.
The storage of the information is challenging too. As the data is personally identifiable, customers need to be completely confident that it is being managed correctly and held securely for the right amount of time. With manual systems, there are plenty of opportunities for mistakes to be made.
This is why many organisations are preferring to capture customer data digitally.
WiFi SPARK’s customer, a coffee chain with hundreds of sites in the UK and already known for its state of the art public WiFi offering, has elected to adapt their WiFi portal to incorporate the capture of customer data to ensure it can be delivered to the UK Government in support of the NHS Test and Trace scheme if required. As the organisation has started to reopen their stores they have had to use a paper and pen method which has proven to be inefficient. The company wanted to make use of the existing infrastructure with a supplier that they already knew and trusted, which is why they chose to use WiFi SPARK’s Track & Trace solution.
A customer will enter the shop and be offered the opportunity to access Free WiFi and sign up to the NHS Test & Trace scheme. They will be asked to input their data into the portal on their smartphone and then proceed to order their drinks and food as usual. The customer data is stored in a secure database that the coffee customer can download and report on whenever they need to. The data is securely encrypted, stored safely and deleted automatically at the end of the required 21 day period. All of the data is managed by WiFi SPARK and the coffee shop customer in GDPR compliant manner.
The WiFi Track & Trace solution will be implemented in hundreds of coffee shops in the UK in the coming weeks.
Read more about the WiFi SPARK Track & Trace service here.
This article was originally published by WiFi SPARK.
