How Aussie ISV Local Measure became Cisco's poster child for customer experience

A Sydney-based ISV landed a spot front-and-centre of Cisco's latest marketing campaign thanks to its work upgrading the Sydney Opera House's wi-fi network with its own analytics platform.

Local Measure's customer experience platform is tailored for the tourism and hospitality sectors, allowing venues to gather information from customers connected to the public wi-fi to generate a customer identity for visitors and digitally engage with them.

Sydney Opera House's (SOH) long-time technology partner Cisco had recently rolled out 300 new Cisco access points for the building through partner Outcomex, no easy feat considering the Opera House's UNESCO World Heritage status.

SOH's marketing team wanted to recognise a greater percentage of the more than 8.2 million visitors the building receives each year.

As a Cisco partner itself, Local Measure was able to step in and integrate its platform into SOH's new wi-fi network to give the marketing team better visibility of visitors and the capability to segment its audiences, giving a better opportunity to continue a line of communications.

Engaging with visitors to a unique venue like the Sydney Opera House comes with its own challenges though. The marketing team wanted to be able to distinguish between one-off guests visiting for a specific event, overseas tourists and regular visitors there to visit a restaurant or bar in the precinct in order to provide better context into their interests.

Local Measure's platform allows SOH's marketing and digital teams to capture demographic information for its CRM from visitors. It also allow customers to give real-time feedback which the marketing and digital teams can address faaster than before.

Another aspect of Local Measure's platform is the ability to create user generated content for the venue's digital signage, which comes in handy for an organisation that shares more than 30,000 pieces of content per month.

“On a day-to-day basis, Local Measure gives us a huge amount of insight into who’s visiting the Opera House site, what they’re doing and what they’re talking about. We use the Local Measure platform everyday," head of digital marketing Tim Snape said.

The first test for the new network came when the Opera House hosted a TEDex conference earlier this year, which saw 80 percent of attendees connect to the wi-fi simultaneously without a hitch.

Cisco's top brass were so impressed, Local Measure was featured as part of Cisco's "Bridge to Possible" marketing campaign focusing on addressing global challenges. In addition to featuring in advertising material, Local Measure was featured on stage during Cisco's partner summit held in Las Vegas last month with a shout out from global channel chief Oliver Tuszik.

"That was pretty major because the bridge to possible is Cisco's main brand campaign. We're an Aussie startup with 50 people so the fact that one of the biggest tech companies in the world is using the tech of a Sydney-based company was pretty incredible," Local Measure founder Jonathan Barouch told CRN.