As the new normal of living alongside Coronavirus has set in; businesses across the country are opening up and adapting to new ways of working safely.
If you have a small shop, restaurant or cafe in England; you’ll more than likely have had to overcome certain hurdles such as limiting people on your premises, providing space for social distancing, and limiting contact between staff and customers.
Whilst you may have got round all of these challenges, there might be a few more things you can do to help limit the spread of Coronavirus in your community. We’ve found that the use of QR codes in local business have been a really useful way of providing information and reducing unnecessary contact with customers.
What are QR Codes?
QR codes work in a similar way to barcodes on products. They are square, machine-readable codes that can be picked up by a smartphone. Once read by the smartphone, the QR code can instantly lead to a specific page on a website, a brochure, an image or an app.
QR codes were originally designed in Japan, where they have always been much more prevalent. But now that it is key to reduce person to person contact; QR codes are popping up in all types of businesses in the UK.
A few years ago, you needed to install a special reader app in order to get your phone to read QR codes. But now you just need to point your phone at the QR code when the camera is open and it’ll read it automatically.
How to Use QR Codes
Over the last few months we’ve seen many different uses for QR codes. It’s definitely clear they’re becoming a great tool at providing information safely during this pandemic. The best thing is they’re free, customisable, and easy to make.
QR codes can be generated online, and can be colour and brand customisable. This means that whatever business you run, you can create perfect, on-brand QR codes that customers can use.
We’ve found some really great uses for QR codes over the last few weeks. Such as at restaurants to find menus, hotels to see welcome letters and coronavirus information. Also in a local pub, where they’d used a QR code for people to sign up to their track and trace. Beauty therapists can use them for their treatment list as well as making offers. And of course certain large supermarkets use a QR code for customers to pay with their scanning systems within the shops.
All of this helps to limit the amount of contact your staff needs to make with customers. It’s therefore a great way of adjusting to the new normal of shopping and eating out.
We’ve even helped some of our marketing clients with QR codes in their local shops and businesses. We can help them get set up so that they link to a specific page on their website if needed. So contact us if you need advice!