Better customer care for everyone!

In difficult economic periods, public institutions also have to tighten their belts. At the same time, it is still necessary to compete with private competitors, and customer care plays an important role in this. RFID offers lots of opportunities to cut costs and still leave the customer feeling like a king.

The National History Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, offers visitors an interactive exhibition tour. It is a system based on a small computer equipped with RFID technology, which was first used at a bird exhibition in 2004 and 2005. The roughly 50 exhibits were all fitted with transponders. The device then played interesting videos and audio files with information about the animals. This also allowed the exhibition organizers to see which information was viewed the most by visitors. This enables them to learn and develop the exhibition in a more visitor-orientated way for the future.

In Munich City Library, visitors can borrow media at self-service terminals thanks to RFID technology. All library media are fitted with transponders, and at special terminals in the entrance area, library cards and media can be scanned and borrowed in a matter of seconds. Returning media works in the same way. This makes time-consuming queues a thing of the past.

In Tokyo, the capital of Japan, tourists and business travelers can use RFID to help them get around the city. As part of the pilot project, more than 10,000 transponders were placed in businesses, bars and street lamps in the business and entertainment district Ginza. Using a handheld reader, visitors can find transponders and get information about places through a wireless Internet connection.