Automatic Volume Control: Introducing Atmosphere by Startle
Written by
Shaun Potter
Published
March 16, 2023
Category
Startle news
At Startle, we’re focused on creating memorable customer experiences in retail and hospitality venues.
This includes the perfect music, signage, and now - atmosphere monitoring.
That’s why we launched Atmosphere, our first-of-its-kind atmosphere monitoring tool.
What is Atmosphere?
With our first-of-its-kind atmosphere monitoring tool, retail and hospitality businesses can gain invaluable insight into how the environment of your locations changes over time. And more importantly, how this impacts areas like sales, footfall and other customer behaviours.
To find out more, head here.
One of the key features of Atmosphere is Smart Volume - the automatic volume control we can trigger off the back of this data. Let’s dive into why we think it could be an invaluable tool for your business.
How can it help?
In a study into hospitality trends, noise levels were the most common complaint, and lighting and music are 2 of the biggest factors that can change your ambience. By automating volume changes so that music levels adapt alongside busyness, you can be confidently in control of your atmosphere without having to distract your busy onsite teams.
Automatic volume control means your staff can focus on what’s important - serving customers and creating positive interactions. No rushing behind the bar or till to adjust the noise level. And crucially, it means that each customer has a perfectly curated music experience.
Having complete control and confidence across all your sites brings peace of mind. With Atmosphere, you can ensure your brand image and customer experience remains consistent, from Aberdeen to Aldershot.
If you’re a pub or bar, you’re familiar with the particulars around music licensing in your venue, including the maximum decibels at different times of day. With our automatic volume control data, you have proof of the volume played in your site if you ever need it.
Furthermore, some research shows that loud music can lead to a distorted perception of how much time has passed, particularly in females, who tend to think less time has passed when loud music is playing. If your business has a majority female demographic, this is a great opportunity to increase dwell time, likely resulting in higher spends. Studies have looked at the idea of time perception with sound - music with a slow tempo in contrast with music with a fast tempo increases emotional responses and makes consumers perceive the waiting time to be shorter, thus resulting in staying longer in the store.
The Clever Bit
So, how does it work? Once easily installed, our atmosphere sensor starts to get to work. The system will determine the busyness and learn the volume levels of your site, to calibrate the audible range to how busy it is. Atmosphere will then change the volume within the predetermined ranges for these dates - for example, 70-80db for when it’s “very busy”.
The dynamic audio profiling system allows the real time state of your site to dictate changes in the music volume, meaning a consistent, positive experience for your customers is produced, automatically.
The volume will automatically adjust to real time footfall by analysing 10,000 data points over the course of a day (this data is also super valuable for insights into levels of trades across all your sites, btw).
And on the tangible side, the hardware for Atmosphere is small and discreet, so no need to worry about bulky equipment . One smart sensor that can give you highly valuable pre-POS insights into your levels of trade, and connects to the bracket magnetically so it can be easily removed for charging (which is only once every 6 months anyway), with no wires required for installation.
Like what you hear?
Head to our Atmosphere page to learn more about our new data monitoring service, or speak to our team to discuss Smart Volume in more detail.
Finding our brand sound has been an exciting and interesting journey, and the help that we've had from the guys at Startle has been super valuable. We have to hand it to them, they nailed it from the get-go and we've been happily bopping away to these playlists ever since!
Hattie Shaw, BEAR Coffee
