CUSTOMER TICKETS: SUPPORT BETWEEN OPERATORS - CUSTOMERS REVISED

Support between you and your customers is an important thing to maintain the quality of your service. Therefore we have revised this area and introducing a new feature in the Control Center called "Customer Tickets".

Before today customers could fill out an online form from your splash page, which was sent to you by email. Then you could reply to the user.

This approach has a big disadvantage: if your customers had problems with accessing your hotspot, they couldn't access their mailboxes to read your reply.

With the new ticketing feature, we store tickets and messages in our database and we provide an URL for the customer so he/she can track your answers on your splash page directly. He/she can also reply there or via email (he/she will reply to a generic hotspotsupport.com email address so we can track the message). 

From the operator's view, when a customer sends a message, we inform you via email when a message arrives. Then you can log in to the Control Center and go to Tools & Settings > Customer Tickets where you can read, follow all messages which are listed by case and reply from there.

We will improve this feature further in the following months, we would be glad if you could send your ideas, suggestions on how we could improve this feature further.

UBIQUITI AIROS SECURITY EXPLOIT - UPDATED FIRMWARE

A vulnerability of AirOS has been discovered recently which may grant remote users administrative access to Ubiquiti equipment running AirOS v3/4 and AirOS v5 without requiring authentication. Therefore a newly updated hotspot firmware has been released for AirMax series (802.11 devices were not affected). 

WE STRONGLY RECOMMEND to upgrade the firmware on your AirMax device (Rocket M, NanoStation/LocoStation M, NanoBridge M, Bullet M, PicoStation M, PowerBridge M, AirBridge M) as soon as possible.

You can download the new firmware from this URL: http://www.hotspotsystem.com/firmware/hss/Ubiquiti/Airmax/

Initial Release Of Hotspot Free Social

Hotspot FREE SOCIAL is a service which helps you create the 'buzz' for your business. You can offer free Wi-Fi internet connection in return for getting "liked" on your Facebook Page. When someone LIKEs your page it can be seen by all of their friends. This increases your business' visibility, customer engagement and your sales! It also helps you to grow your customer database for future promotions.

Example Splash Page with Hotspot FREE SOCIAL

Furthermore, the service helps you learn more about your customers. You will see gender and age information, their originating country/town, languages they are using, etc. (this information is provided by Facebook).

Future Plans:

We will add several new options to Hotspot FREE SOCIAL within a few weeks. This will include an option to have a custom message posted by the customers' wall like: 'I am enjoying free Wi-Fi at Joe's Cafe.'
Furthermore you can request permissions from the user to have an access to his/her personal details like name, email address, etc.


Pricing:

Hotspot FREE SOCIAL is starting from $9.90 per month. For this money you can get max. 50 likes per month. Hotspot FREE SOCIAL 300 and 600 are also available.


Upgrade options:

If you are using Hotspot FREE SPLASH (which is now known Hotspot FREE BASIC), you can easily upgrade through the Control Center > Manage > Locations > click on name > Modify Hotspot Data > upgrade banner will be on the bottom of the page. If you want to switch from other packages, please write us a Help Desk ticket at http://help.hotspotsystem.com and let us know which package you would like to use (50,300,600).


Free Trial for New Locations:

Once you choose the Hotspot FREE SOCIAL as your business model, you can try out the service by sending customer to our Facebook page (which is the default option). After you pay the subsctiption fee you will be able to set your Facebook page from the Control Center > Modify Hotspot Data > Social Settings.

THE NEXT BIG THING: FACEBOOK MEETS WI-FI

In January 2012 we will introduce a brand new hotspot type, called "HOTSPOT FREE SOCIAL" and we are very excited about it :)

With this solution you can give out free internet access to any customer who "LIKEs" your Facebook page. This is a very good tool to promote your business as ONE LIKE will spread out the word to HUNDREDS of other people too (all friends of each customer).

We are also working on an advanced version of Hotspot FREE Social which will request a permission from the user to allow you to post on their walls. Every time the customer wants to use your wi-fi, a customized message will be posted on their walls like "I am using the free Wi-Fi at Joe's place!".

Social marketing is becoming very important to all businesses and by using the combination of FREE Wi-FI and social media you can create the buzz for your business very quickly and effective.

The service will be available in January, 2012, starting from $9.90/month so stay tuned!

VAT CHANGES

From 1st of January, 2012, VAT changes from 25% to 27%. This affects only operators from the EU without a valid VAT ID.

New Forums Launched - Be part of our community!

We have launched a new Forums section on our website at:

http://www.hotspotsystem.com/wififorums/

IMPORTANT: You can use your existing operator username and password to log in to the forums, you DON'T HAVE TO REGISTER.

If you want to introduce yourself to others, or just have a discussion with other operators, you can start using the new forums now.
You can also leave feedbacks, post case studies and get help from our team and hopefully from other operators as well.

With this new addition you can now reach us the following ways:

- Over the phone or on Skype on weekdays during business hours
- Live chat on weekdays during business hours
- Open a New Help Desk ticket (24/7)
- Hotspot System Wi-Fi Hotspot Forums
- Hotspot System on Twitter
- Hotspot System on Facebook
- Hotspot System Blog

"Remember me" option for Wi-Fi Users at Login

We have added a "Remember me" functionality to the hotspot login pages.

You can hide this option from the Control Center which is especially useful when you are using desktop computers in your location and you wish to avoid that one user may log in with the previous user's details. You can turn this option OFF in the Control Center > Edit location > Splash Page Settings > "Display 'Remember Me' checkbox on Login Pages" checkbox.

If you are using custom skins, you need to update hotspotlogin_loginform.inc.html and main_combined.inc.html for combined login pages.

KNOWN ISSUES:
iOS devices and now the latest OSX Lion brings up a login popup safari when users connects to a wi-fi network and the OS cannot ping apple.com, this is how it knows that you don't have a full access to the internet so it brings up the splash page immediately. Unfortunately this behavior has its disadvantages. First, this is not a regular Safari browser and cookies are handled differently so the "remember me" functional will partially work (if you are using iOS devices), or won't work at all (if you are using Lion where the login popup doesn't handle cookies at all). Another thing is that when the user logs in, the popup disappears and the user won't see the popup which we display for the user with session statistics and logout information.

We have a knowledgebase article about this issue here with a "solution".