Like any service organization, museums are looking for innovative ways to gain insight in consumption patterns, to better optimize resources and to improve the guest experience.

The Cisco Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) solution helps organizations use their network as a platform, to derive analytics that can be used to better understand how guests with mobile devices  use and interact with a venue. These types of insight can allow venues like museums to optimize their operations and deliver a better experience  to their guests.

CMX Analytics takes location data, captured from devices detected on the Wi-Fi network, and visualizes it in the form of a simple dashboard with reporting capabilities, to show measurements such as dwell time, device count and device density. For a museum, these metrics provide invaluable  insights when data can be easily customized and compared to previous periods.

I sat down with Jagdish Girimaji, Senior Product Manager of the CMX solution to get a closer look at some of ways that museums are utilizing CMX Analytics to transform their business.

Visualizing Visitor Movement Patterns

With CMX Analytics, a museum can gain insight into aggregate movement patterns of visitors within the physical venue. The analytics can point to business outcomes such as what set of exhibits were visited, how visitors are transitioning from room to room, and how long visitors are staying in each exhibit zone.

Determining Resource Utilization

One common museum service offered to visitors is a rented iPod audio tour with a mobile app. These audio tour iPods are Wi-Fi enabled and connected to the Wi-Fi guest network at the museum.  These devices show up  on the CMX Analytics dashboard as associated devices.

This capability provides the museum visibility into resource utilization and insight on how the audio tour affects visitor movement patterns as compared to people without the iPods. The museum can also better understand which exhibits visitors saw and for how long they stayed, as well as when the devices left and returned to the rental kiosk.

Evaluating Program Development

One of the biggest value-adds of a technology like CMX Analytics is being able to make business decisions based on historical trends. Just as how the finance department forecasts spending and budgeting based on previous expenditures, historical analytics on user behavior in a venue can help drive business observations that can be invaluable to program development and planning.

With historical location analytics data, a museum can compare  guest  movement patterns between a weekday and a holiday and plan operations and programs and budget resources accordingly.
This could also be used to evaluate the draw to new exhibits compared to the standing exhibits for the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Eras. Depending on those metrics, the museum may or may not bring them back next time around.

These are just some of the ways that museums are utilizing the CMX solution to enhance the end-user experience and gain operational insights to improve upon the venue. Deriving analytics like location analytics from the network opens the doors to a whole world of possibilities on technology can help drive business outcomes.

To find out more about Cisco's CMX, visit www.cisco.com/go/cmx.

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