RaGaPa CEO Gagandeep Singh has elaborated on everything that you need to know about CaptiveXS.
You can either read the text below or if you’re a fan of audio, you can check out this podcast. Feel free to ask questions at the end of this article. We’ll get back to you.
[00:00:02.190] – Asif
Hello and welcome to this podcast. I’m Asif, from RaGaPa marketing. And today I’m here with Gagandeep Singh, the CEO, and co-founder of RaGaPa. Gagan has over 15 years of industry experience in networking and software development and is a pioneer in his industry with the WiFi monetization and engagement solution, CaptiveXS. Hi Gagan!
[00:00:24.860] – Gagan
Hey Asif!
[00:00:24.860] – Asif
So Gagan, why don’t you tell us more about CaptiveXS solution.
[00:00:27.770] – Gagan
Absolutely Asif. So right from the very beginning, from the very inception our focus on the company front has been on the Wi-Fi monetization engagement and with CaptiveXS what we have done is basically combine all those essential guest Wi-Fi features into a single solution. CaptiveXS provides multiple touch points from a marketing standpoint for guest Wi-Fi users.
You onboard the users through the captive portal, which is the first touch point. Then you have the In Session where you continue this user experience journey for the guest Wi-Fi and then finally, all those actionable analytics that we collect around the users can be used for when the user walks out of your venue through email marketing/SMS marketing or just saving that information for knowing your customers better.
[00:01:14.030] – Gagan
So this is a completely cloud managed platform and it’s highly scalable. With this you get the best of both worlds, there is out of the box monetization engagement features as well as we provide some of the basic security features that come with the solution. So that’s the completeness of the solution for any guest Wi-Fi network that is out there and that’s looking to monetize as well as provide a safer environment for their users.
[00:01:36.260] – Asif
Right. So, Gagan, you mentioned three touch points including that it’s cloud managed and that you have these security features as well. So what business problems are you solving for your customers with these?
[00:01:49.400] – Gagan
So quite a few. The very first problem that we are trying to solve is, in today’s day and age the Wi-Fi infrastructure has become a cost especially providing free Wi-Fi to the guests. It is an added cost for the venues. And so what we have done is change the Wi-Fi costs into a revenue generator with the CaptiveXS solution., Venues are trying to recoup this value somehow and with the CaptiveXS they’re able to use this Wi-Fi marketing platform and get the most out of it.
[00:02:17.780] – Gagan
We have a lot of success stories around it. Cedar Fair, New York Racing Association, Telecom Fiji and a whole bunch of other customers that use our solution and recoup the investment that they have done on the infrastructure front. The second key factor, Asif, that we are also trying to solve for our major customers is that typically the solution, such as this is scattered. There are features that are all over the place. With CaptiveXS, like I said we put everything together in a single platform that is managed through a single dashboard. That really adds a lot of value for the end-customer.
[00:02:49.570] – Gagan
The customer is not going out there, trying to look for different vendors to come up with a more comprehensive solution and then answer their monetization needs. Just with CaptiveXS alone, they’re able to get all their questions answered and then, our Gateway Solution, in fact, adds even more of the security features including content insertion and content filtering and IoT discovery and all. So together, it becomes a very powerful monetization platform with all those marketing features in there. Plus there are some features on the IoT side, some of the features on the content filtering side that provide security on top.
[00:03:25.190] – Asif
So what you’ve done is address the first feature. The first principle of monetizing a passive asset that venue owners and turning guest Wi-Fi into a money generating asset. In fact, you’ve turned it into a marketing lever for customers. How is captive access deployed?
[00:03:43.430] – Gagan
We have both the options: the on-premise and the cloud deployment. So based on the customer needs, we can offer one or the other solution. For the cloud we can integrate out of the box, radius based integration and we currently support Ruckus, Aruba, Meraki, Ubiquity and we’re adding more as we speak. On the Gateway side, we offer both VM and Raspberry Pi based software solutions that can be easily deployed on-prem and can be managed through cloud. So in both cases, the solution management comes in the cloud but the deployment can be based on what the customer needs.
[00:04:14.300] – Gagan
If the customer wants to put in hardware as a gateway in lane traffic they can definitely opt into a PI or a VM based solution. But if they want nothing on-prem our cloud solution works like a charm.
[00:04:27.010] – Asif
With both options being available for customers in the form of on-premise and cloud managed guest Wi-Fi, who should use CaptiveXS?
[00:04:34.570] – Gagan
So typically, anybody who offers a free guest Wi-Fi network or even paid, for that matter falls into this category. Any venue that is offering a guest network and wants to recoup some of the costs, monetize it and provide a safer environment is our potential customer. It doesn’t matter how big or small they are. It doesn’t matter if it is an enterprise or an SMB, a sports arena or an airport for that matter. As long as they offer guest Wi-Fi and want to monetize it, we’re the go-to guys for them
[00:05:09.580] – Asif
And what sets CaptiveXS apart from others?
[00:05:13.880] – Gagan
So there are a few things here, Asif, and I feel really proud when I talk about these points. The first one is the technology itself and the completeness of the feature set that we have in the monetization engagement front. That sets us apart. The three touch points that I talked about when the user walks in the first touch points through a captive portal, the ongoing touchpoint through continuous engagement through content insertion and then the post engagement through analytics and the email marketing campaigns and SMS campaigns that you can build and deliver to our platform.
[00:05:45.740] – Gagan
When you put all of that together it becomes a very strong, very powerful cohesive engagement monetization platform. And then that sets us apart from everybody out there, but not just that. Secondly, the other important things are there is out of the box unified platform features, where like I said the customer doesn’t have to go to four or five different vendors to get all those features together and then manage it two different dashboards that sets us apart as well. You have one place, you get all the features out of the box, you manage them to a single dashboard. You manage multiple locations through a single platform and then that’s where it becomes really easy for whoever is operating on our platform.
[00:06:22.970] – Gagan
The dashboard itself is very intuitive. There are no tech skills required to manage it. Any marketing guys can easily do it. And then time and time, we are appreciated by our customers on the ease of deployment and management of the entire solution. It’s simply out of the box you do a few configurations, its deployed and it’s very easy to manage at the same time. And then finally Asif, this is one of the other key points that set us apart, is the pricing for that support. We’re very competitively priced in the market. Unlike others in the same space that’ll charge for a feature, we have all the features included in the single pricing.
[00:06:56.420] – Gagan
Once you buy a solution, any new features that come up in the solution are automatically included in your pricing. And then finally our support. We have world-class support and our philosophy is customer first, customer last. And we go out of our way to help our customers with their needs. We’ve even hand helped some of our customers through their monetization needs, customizing the solution, tailoring it to their exact specifications and requirements and that also sets us apart.
So technology, the foremost thing that gets us in, the completeness of the platform that it’s all together, and the ease of use of deployment and management. Those are the key factors but at the same time, the after sales support. That also drives a lot of value out of our solution. Our market is very price sensitive, so pricing it at the right point helps us. So all those things combined set us way apart from any of our competitors out there in the market today.
[00:07:49.110] – Asif
You mentioned some great features, great aspects of your product and CaptiveXS is an out-of-the-box solution. It provides powerful analytics. It’s totally cohesive. It’s known for its ease of deployment and it’s quite intuitive to use. You don’t have to be technically skilled to use it and you offer competitive pricing and the complete package also includes great after sales support. Can you talk about some of your success stories?
[00:08:14.100] – Gagan
Yeah absolutely! To be honest, we have successes in pretty much all verticals. From transportation to retail chains, large public venues such as stadiums and amusement parks. Citywide network, hospitality customers, pretty much every single one of those verticals have benefited from a solution like ours and from us basically. However, are one of our marquee customers is Cedar Fair. We love to talk about them. They’ve actually not just renewed their parks, that they have started out with 5 parks. They’ve actually added more parks and more features as we went along right with them.
[00:08:47.340] – Gagan
So this year we’ll be live with all eleven parks with Cedar Fair. They use Ruckus out of the box integration, simple to deploy and we’ve seen great value with them. They have seen perfect ROI with our solution. There is immense value with our solution on the engagement and analytics side with them.
The number of e-mails we collect, the number of impressions we deliver, the click-through rates, all that adds a lot of value for a customer like Cedar Fair. They are just a perfect example of how to get the best value out of CaptiveXS and we love talking about them.
[00:09:17.700] – Gagan
It’s a very big customer at the same time. They have most optimally used this platform to get the best value out of it. There are others obviously, but Cedar Fair is one of the marquee customers that we talk about in such cases.
[00:09:31.910] – Asif
That’s great Gagan! Can you talk a little bit more about how Cedar Fair and your other customers use CaptiveXS to better engage with their customers?
[00:09:39.800] – Gagan
Definitely! So like I said, they use the 3 touch points we talk about. They have a fully custom captive portal page so once a user walks into any of their parks Knott’s Berry Farm or Great America or Cedar Point, they’ll first see, as soon as they are connected to Wi-Fi, they’ll see a pop up splash page where it’s fully branded to the park, the look and feel there are a couple of questions that are being asked the Name, Email and the zip code and marketing opt-in message, EULA. Once the user goes beyond that, they are actually shown maybe a promotional video or a season pass, promotion going on or something else going on within that park at that location.
[00:10:17.390] – Gagan
And then, once they fully go through the Captive Portal, we just don’t leave the customer there. The experience continues while they’re at the park. So every time they open the browser they go to different Web sites. We’re able to push content during that in session. Now those can be pop up videos, it can be lower banner ads. They can be promotional videos anything that you can ever imagine, up to the fact that you can even push surveys. You can throw in a feedback form, so you can get user updates.
[00:10:44.920] – Gagan
You can push alerts or messaging right during the entire time when they’re in your venue and then finally all that information that we collect is actually pushed directly into the third party CRM that we integrate with for Cedar Fair and then they run out all those campaigns when the customer has left the venue which includes your email campaigns, SMS campaigns or whatever have you.
They have a whole bunch of rich user analytics data that they can do, pretty much everything that they want from a user perspective. They can see how many times that user has visited their locations, how long were they in their location and all those different analytics around the user behavior. So that adds a lot of value to understanding your customer and their needs while they were at your venue.
[00:11:29.120] – Asif
In-session touchpoint is quite fascinating. Could you talk a little more about content insertion?
[00:11:36.340] – Gagan
Absolutely! So content insertion has been our key differentiator, Asif. As I mentioned, it’s one of the touch points that we talk about quite often, because for one it is completely missing in any competitive solution. And most of these solutions that you see in the market today, they talk about the captive portal, the onboarding part and once the users on board it’s all about analytics. But we have this extra touchpoint that we love to talk about. It’s proprietary to us and our customers see immense value with that, because of that ongoing experience that we build for the user. So the users onboard, they have full internet access.
Now during the entire stay in the venue, we’re able to push content while they’re on the browsers. And then it’s completely agnostic of what device type you use, what browser you have or what screen size you have. It just pops up – whatever the message you want to have. It could be a form – it could be a survey form, it could be a feedback form, it could be simply a pop-up video or a banner or whatever have you. Any promotions that you want to run, any convenience stuff that you want to show to your end customer. Any messaging that you want to push out to the customers. That can be done throughout the user session, with in-session technology, the Content Insertion.
[00:12:46.930] – Asif
So CaptiveXS is able to help venue owners and businesses create targeted and relevant promotions for their audiences and you can collect actionable data from their customers. Right?
[00:12:58.210] – Gagan
That is correct, Asif.
[00:12:59.320] – Gagan
So not just pushing the right content to them or promoting the right content or delivering the right message to the users. It’s also the analytics behind it. Every information that you capture from that user and then how you use those actionable insights or analytics is key. So not just collection of the information, how to do action on top is also a key factor here. And Cedar Fair actually does pretty well in completing that loop.
[00:13:25.010] – Asif
So with this great seamless experience that businesses can provide to their audiences and customers, it doesn’t have to be a single experience, in fact, they can customize it as per their audience segments. In fact, you also have this great feature where businesses can offer different levels of services to their users. Could you elaborate more on that?
[00:13:42.710]
Yeah. Yeah. And we just recently added that. This is what we call the Access Tiers.
[00:13:47.650] – Gagan
You could enable multiple access tiers for a venue. For instance, the perfect example is hospitality where we have customers that want to use free guest Wi-Fi for a certain amount of time at a certain speed. But they want to give premium access to people who actually pay for the Wi-Fi.
So you could build multiple tiers on the splash page itself the Captive portal page itself, and you can have the user opt into one or the other. In certain cases what we’ve seen in public Wi-Fi and there’ll be a free Wi-Fi tier where you’ll be shown four or five different advertising and you’ll be made to log through social login and provide your information, whereas on the premier side you will just do a payment through PayPal which is fully integrated with our solution and you will be able to have a seamless Internet connectivity after that.
Now, we also control of different tiers with different bandwidth speeds, different session timeouts, different landing pages so you could configure all that from our dashboard and it’s a great feature when you want to offer different levels of services, different accesses to different kind of people who want to have either free with advertising or paid with faster premier access. So it kind of fits everybody’s budget at the same time, monetizes because on the free side you’re showing the advertising. On the paid side you’re getting paid, so either way, the venue is able to monetize the network.
[00:15:10.750]
Great! Thanks, Gagan.
If you like what you heard, be sure to check us out on captivexs.com
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