Vicinity Centres: Australia's Leading Retail Property Group Goes Digital

Mappedin collaborated with Vicinity Centres to help them undergo a digital transformation and become a core component to scale across their portfolio. 

The Customer

Vicinity Centres is one of Australia's leading retail REIT groups and the second largest listed manager of Australian retail property. With six venues in their Mappedin portfolio and headquartered in Melbourne, Vicinity focuses on luxury and market-leading experiences that also emphasize sustainability. Their flagship location Chadstone is known as The Fashion Capital and with their impressive portfolio, Vicinity has set the bar across Australia for both experience and selection.

The Opportunity

As Vicinity looked to their future initiatives, they had several checklist items that Mappedin could help with. The continuation of their ‘market-leading destinations’ directive, but also the expansion and investment of their portfolio, and to realize the opportunity for mixed- use properties.

The opportunity to work with a large-scale technically savvy customer who understood the importance of the digital experience and had innovation in mind as a main theme for their continued growth, made for a great fit. Mappedin offered a solution that gave Vicinity one central source of truth that could expand across the organization, which was both scalable and easy-to-use.

The Solution

As our first Australian customer, understanding the unique challenges of an international client were crucial to identify and address to ensure an optimized launch. In order to assist with the overall digitization of their maps and updating of their websites, four venues were brought on as pilot projects and quickly launched, beginning with our Mappedin Web and expanding to include Digital Directories.

Responsive Web App: In order to assist with the overall digitization of their maps and keep a unified brand experience, the maps at various venues across the portfolio were uploaded into the CMS and optimized for efficiency. This also allowed for the continuation of a streamlined experience from physical to digital, while enabling customers to navigate from the web experience on their mobile devices while on-site at the venues.

Digital Directories: New directories were placed at several of Vicinity’s most popular venues to showcase the digital map created using the CMS. This allowed customers to navigate through the venue, as well as give data about what consumers were searching for, how often they ended up at their destination, and also gave data about what stores consumers wanted to see or expected to see at each venue. The directory experience focuses on a clean and simple UX approach that highlights the information customers require in a minimalistic format.

New Features: The client also liked the addition of several newly developed features that launched at their venues as they were rolled out, include QR Mobile Pass on the Digital Directories, as well as venue fingerprinting and IMDF set-up in order to collaborate with Apple. 

The Results

After implementation, it was clear that we could be a great strategic partner to help Vicinity go through their digital transformation, and become a core component in the process of creating a tool that they could use to scale up across their various properties.

As a client, Vicinity was very active in how they interacted with the products and how they wanted to collaborate with us on building out new features.

Over the course of 2019, with full deployment of a number of Mappedin products across venues, Vicinity saw a marked increase of unique sessions over time. The Mappedin Web deployment showcases the most usage, with users being able to use it both at home and at the venue for their convenience.

Through the spread of location selection, the minimalist and brand-consistent user interface design allowed customers to simply browse the entire venue and select their location. This also indicates that customers may not know what they are looking for when they get to a directory, and having information readily available to them in real-time allows them to explore and plot a route with multiple stops.

Looking Forward

We continue to work with Vicinity to support the launch of new venues that are added to their portfolio, as well as the addition of new products and features that fit with their needs and direction going forward.

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