Helsinki Central Station utilizes Hypercell’s service to collect visitor data

Helsinki Central Station is updating their premises to better serve their clients and tenants.

Hypercell’s service provides real-time visitor data, which now has been made available to all the tenants. The collected data will be used as a starting point for the station's service planning in the future, as Hypercell's service offers the data in an easy-to-understand format, helping the decision-making process move along more efficiently.

Helsinki Central Station is currently operating a bidding round for business premises in the next development phase. In addition to current tenants, all future potential tenants have received user IDs for the data produced by Hypercell, which they can use when preparing offers for business premises. The data enables all actors to have an equal starting point, where making an offer is based on factual real-time data.

Jani Jääskeläinen, who works as the project manager of Helsinki Central Station real estate unit sees multiple value points in using the service.

- The information can be used to forecast demand, to determine the service offering, and also to evaluate daily variations in the calculation of resources and raw materials.

Additionally, Jääskeläinen finds it useful that the data provides insight of specific time intervals and opens up to new possibilities for optimizing the railway station’s services.

- From the data produced by Hypercell, we can see the fluctuations in the number of visitors at the level of seasons, months, days of the week and hours, which makes resourcing easy to do in the future as well. Data offers tenants opportunities to better identify congestion peaks and they can target, for example, quick take-away product campaigns at peak times, or increase of staff and cashiers at peak times. The tenants of the railway station have flexible opening hours, and the data offers a good tool for optimizing them as well.

Prior to covid-19, the station had more than 250,000 visitors on the best days, and based on Hypercell's data, the average number of visitors in December 2022 was still approximately 220,000. According to Jääskeläinen, it can be estimated that at this point there is still approx. 10-15% less traffic than in 2019.

In the measurement service previously used by Helsinki Central Station, a significant calibration factor had to be used to get the data to match reality as well as possible. When using Hypercell's solution, the use of a multiplier is not necessary, but the calibration is available if the customer wants to use it for a specific reason. Unlike the previous solution, the data from Hypercell's service can be easily distributed to all tenants in real-time, so that they all have an equal opportunity to benefit from it, especially in the vicinity of their own business premises. The data helps the tenants to optimize their services and on-premise advertising.

Jääskeläinen also appreciates the possibility to collect route data within their sensor network to make the traffic flow as smooth as possible. He concludes that Hypercell’s service helps the Helsinki Central Station to improve their services based on the actual customer needs.

- The data can also be used in the planning of traffic routes and placement of signage. It also provides insight on where different services should be located inside the station area. With the help of Hypercell's data, we are truly able to lead the changes of Helsinki Central Station and build its services to meet the needs of our customers. We also see the attraction of different areas at different times, as this helps us comprehensively in the planning of services.