Telenor has partnered with a bus company in Oslo in a trial of beacon technology that it hopes will provide new channels for customer communication.
The collaboration with Ruter will see beacons deployed at the Lysaker bus stop and Telenor Fornebu.
Telenor employees travelling on bus routes will receive questions triggered by the beacons.
The unnamed technology has previously been tested with the My Telenor app in the operator’s stores and at Telenor Arena and Ullevaal Stadium. It has also been tested internally with the telco’s employees.
According to Christine Presterud, Market Analyst at Ruter, the technology could replace email surveys and reduce the need for staff to directly conduct passenger research.
Telenor said that the project is aimed at learning more about how to communicate with customers in real time.
According to ABI Research, beacons are one of the biggest opportunities for growth for Bluetooth technology. The firm predicts them to be the third largest market for Bluetooth by 2021.
ABI’s researchers also said shipments of beacons will break half a billion units by 2021, as the market moves towards personal tracking, real-time location systems (RTLS) and asset tracking, as well as IoT.