Businesses Should Offer Passbook Passes

Passbook Features

With the impending release of Passbook with iOS6 this fall, people have already begun talking about it and looking for places to create Passbook passes.  Passbook will be a native app for iOS6 and will serve as a mobile wallet that stores all your coupons, tickets, store cards, and passes.  It bundles everything up in one easy to use interface and categorizes each pass accordingly.

One of the most prominent features of Passbook is its time and location enabled settings.  To illustrate, when a customer steps into a movie theatre, their ticket would appear right on their lock screen.  Passbook can recognise a user's location and have the relevant pass appear at the right time.  In addition, if your flight is delayed, a push notification is sent to the device informing the user of the change, and the pass is updated dynamically to reflect the new time.  

Passbook for Business

Customer service will reach new heights.  Real-time communication from Passbook will strengthen the business to consumer relationship as firms can provide updated  news and information on their goods and services instantaneously.  For example, a client could receive an alert of a 10% discount if she is in the district of a particular outlet.  The fact that businesses can leverage geotargeting to their advantages is a very powerful mobile marketing tool.

Firms also no longer have to incur additional printing costs for various passes.  Tickets, coupons, and cards wouldn't require printing if they are all digitalized.  In fact, updating these passes wouldn't require reprints too, and users can easily download Passbook passes.  Transactions are carried out more efficiently and at the consumer's convenience.

Because Passbook does not store credit card information, it's not a complete mobile payment system.  However, the introduction of Passbook to consumers is a gradual step into mobile payments and could eventually lead to an adoption of mobile payments in the future, especially if Apple adopts NFC into its devices.

It is the perfect time to equip your business and become Passbook ready.   Start to create Passbook passes because the benefits to the business and consumer are massive.  There's no telling how this will magnify when Passbook is officially released.