Utilities: Identifing New Market Opportunities with Location Intelligence

Utilities: Identifying New Market Opportunities with Location Intelligence

spatial accuracy

What Marketers can learn from Han Solo and his obsession for Spatial Accuracy

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… Han Solo enlightened Luke Skywalker on the importance of having access to accurate location data while traveling through the alternate dimension, aka, hyperspace.

In Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the Captain of the Millennium Falcon quipped, “Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, kid! Without precise calculations, we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?”

Objects in hyperspace travel faster than the speed of light, so it is easy to think of hyperspace as a phenomenon disconnected from the real universe. However, every point in hyperspace is associated with an actual place and moment in realspace. And the gravitational signature of a real space object (stars, planets, asteroids, etc.) has a very tangible – and dangerous – impact on the objects in hyperspace.

In fact, collisions with these ‘mass shadows’ are usually catastrophic for a starship. Which is why Han was matter-of-fact in his conversation with an impatient Luke that the Millennium Falcon would not make the jump to hyperspace until the navigation computer had churned out the exact coordinates for the journey.

If you really think about it, having access to precise location data is just as relevant to our world as it was in the Star Wars galaxy. According to market research company Forrester, quality and transparency of location data are top concerns for marketers in North America. 34% of the marketers Forrester contacted were convinced that they are working with an inaccurate location database.

Fraudulent or incomplete address data can be as catastrophic for business as coming into contact with a ‘mass shadow’. Here are a few real-life examples of what can go wrong with inaccurate location data:

  • You invest a lot of time and money into designing direct mailing campaigns and getting top-quality print material, but do not receive the anticipated response because the address database you are using has incomplete or invalidated addresses.
  • You plan a new store location based on the inputs provided by your location database, but end up getting cannibalized because the nearby competitor business listings points of interest (POI) data you were using was outdated.
  • You want to create a self-servicing automation service for your website to increase customer satisfaction, but because of the inaccurate postal code data being used by the system, your potential clients now believe you do not provide service in their area.

Missed opportunities, inefficient site planning, increased costs, and reduced insights are only some of the ways through which incomplete, inaccurate, and out-of-date address data can hurt your business.

But just like Han could rely on the navi computer to put the starship on the correct path, you can trust DMTI Spatial to provide you the best-quality address data for Canada. DMTI’s award-winning Location Hub® is powered by the largest nationally sourced Canadian geospatial database, making it the most up-to-date, comprehensive, and accurate location data in the market.

The platform not only provides a unique identifier for each address, but it also enriches the database with related content like name and phone number, demographics, firmographics, flood data, environmental risk information, land use information, etc. – ensuring unparalleled business insights. You can test drive Location Hub today by clicking here.

Already own location data?  Check how clean it is by signing up for a free Address Quality Assessment. Because in the end, all we want is that the force of powerful location data be with you!

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Location Intelligence

How QSR Marketers are Using Location Intelligence to Improve Revenue and Loyalty

Telecom Guide Location Intelligence

How Telecom Marketers can Optimize Customer Touchpoints Using Location Intelligence

Big data has led to big changes in marketing, and Telecom marketing teams are finding that leveraging location data can lead to impressive (and measurable!) gains in profitability. Location intelligence is a digital technology that offers Telecom companies insights they can leverage to optimize a wide range of customer touchpoints. Each of these customer touchpoints is essential for driving growth and improving customer retention.

Here’s a checklist of 4 customer touchpoints that Telecom marketers can optimize using location intelligence:

Locate Your Target Market

Identifying your target market is the base on which all customer touchpoints stand on.

A strong location intelligence platform offers dynamic search capabilities, allowing you to find where your target market is by inputting certain data points.

For example, if you’re seeking to expand into markets with a high concentration of people ages 24-40 and within a high income bracket, you can search for that information and view it on a digital map. Or perhaps you want learn more about an area that is heavily targeted by one of your competitors. You can do all of this using location intelligence. Additionally, you can see if the areas in your search results align with your existing areas of coverage.

Develop Excellent Customer Service

Customer service is arguably the most important customer touchpoint. This is especially true in today’s social media-driven world, where any bad customer experience has the potential to go viral. Location intelligence platforms help you cleanse and standardize addresses across databases, which results in improved customer service efficiencies from billing and starting services, to handling service calls and customer complaints.

Empowering your customer service team with location data allows them to react quickly and efficiently. For example, realtime mapping data of your service areas helps with timely scheduling of service providers. Dynamic location data helps your customer care team respond to all types of service calls more effectively, and even helps them upsell features when they have a digital map-based view of what’s offered in every coverage area.

Effective Automation Processes

Today’s customers are becoming increasingly accustomed to self-servicing automation services. When they land on your website, they likely want to know cost and availability of services and features for their address. Streaming updated, accurate location data onto your website ensures you’re able to deliver an automated process that effectively serves your customers. This includes allowing them to schedule technicians for service calls, and to find whether you offer the features and services they are seeking in their area. Integration location data with automated customer care systems ensures your customers get accurate information.

Deliver Targeted Messaging

Messaging is involved in every customer touchpoint, whether it’s online, on a bill, or in an advertisement. Location data allows you to better understand the market within a given region so that you can get very specific about your messaging. Additionally, it offers accurate addresses for effective direct mail campaigns. Furthermore, you can leverage geofencing combined with customer data to deliver messaging within high-traffic areas of your target market.

If your company has decided to reach out to a specific area, a location intelligence platform helps you understand and precisely segment demographics in your target market. Perhaps one area has a high concentration of young families – this would indicate that family friendly programming is likely a major selling point. Or perhaps there is a sizable community of high-income households. This would indicate customers who are likely keen to take advantage of advanced, pricer features.

Today’s consumer is highly responsive to personalized marketing. Leveraging location data helps Telecom companies know their markets better, allowing them to deliver messaging, service, and overall customer experiences that truly delight customers and help set you apart from the competition.

Click here to learn how DMTI Spatial helps Telecom companies throughout Canada.

 

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Mitigating Flood Risk with Location Intelligence

While some weather patterns are predictable, extreme weather events tend to run on their own calendar. Unfortunately, severe weather events have a tendency to cause the most damage and are occurring on a more frequent basis, resulting in a substantial financial impact on Canadian insurers.   According to Catastrophe Indices and Quantification Inc. (CatIQ), in 2018 insured damage from severe weather events across Canada reached a staggering $1.9 billion.

Canada will no doubt continue to experience catastrophic weather events, but insurance professionals have solutions available that can help mitigate risks and reduce the financial impact of these events.  Location Intelligence is an emerging field that provides substantial benefit to the insurance industry – from policy quote and approval processes through to claims management and customer service.

Advances in cloud computing are enabling insurers to migrate traditional geospatial analytics from an off-line manual process to real-time integrated solutions and automated workflows.  Using location as a common point of reference, users are able to connect policy, property, claims and third-party data together to gain insight into the property and the surrounding area – allowing them to quickly analyze, visualize and assess property risk.

One common use case is the real-time, automated analysis of a proposed policy vs flood zones, earthquake zones and other potential perils.  Getting a high precision view of where a property sits versus identified risks, allows for more accurate assessments. The availability of real-time location data offers two primary benefits.  The first is increased productivity, delivered by automating assessments and consolidating the output on one screen so that agents can make better faster decisions.  The second is proper pricing for the risk scenarios being proposed.  The key to enabling these benefits is to empower the end user with information in real time.

While an agent is assessing the risk of a potential property, location data can answer a multitude of questions: Is this property exposed to a 1/20, 1/100, 1/200, or 1/1500 year flood event? What are the types and magnitude of historical claims in the surrounding area? Is my accumulation risk too high, or am I able to take on any more policies in this area? Are the current policies priced to cover identified risk? The answers to these questions are imperative when an insurer is trying to accurately calculate total risk exposure from perils and flooding, and accurately quote the policy in a timely manner.

While severe weather events and flooding will continue to present risks to Canadian insurers, access to real-time location data, including flood information, can enable insurers to make more informed decisions during the approval process. While the weather will continue to be unpredictable, location intelligence is a powerful tool to protect your bottom line.

To learn more read our White Paper:  Mitigating Risk with Location Intelligence

 

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Top 3 Ways Location Intelligence Empowers Underwriters

 

Location Intelligence and Analytics

How Strategic Territory Design Leads to More Sales

Could your company be losing millions of dollars each year because of an imbalance in sales territories? Are you sure your sales force is not deploying too much effort against low-potential customers or doing too little to convert key prospects?

According to a study of 300 companies published in the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, sales territory alignment is one of the most commonly overlooked areas of sales force productivity. And optimizing territory design can increase sales by 2 to 7% – without any additional resources or changes in the sales strategy.

Problems with poor territory design

If you really think about it, a major chunk of sales and marketing data is purely geographic in nature – the address of a prospect, postal code, city, phone number, demographics, etc. But, to draw up sales territories, sales operations managers have traditionally relied on Excel spreadsheets.   And there is only so much you can accomplish by flipping through one time-consuming spreadsheet after another.

Sales managers often end up leaving millions of dollars on the table simply because they are not aware that their territories are out of balance. So, while one sales representative may be chasing bad leads and struggling to stay busy, another may be ignoring challenging but high-potential prospects because they are already crushing their targets through easy accounts.

Think about it: Is there any specific territory where you have had trouble retaining salespeople? Could this quick turnover be a result of an opportunity mismatch – that salespeople become discouraged because of the lack of opportunity in their area and leave the organization?

You may be able to spot a similar trend in your incentive pay scheme too. Irrespective of how capable or hard working a salesperson is, their capability of taking home a fair share of incentive pay is significantly impacted by the equitability of sales territory design.
So, if you are looking to foster a culture where you reward someone for their true performance, it may be time to rethink how you design and manage your territories.

Target sales strategically with data visualization

The easiest and most straightforward way to divide sales territories in a fair and balanced manner is to visualize them on a map. And no, using a map does not mean taking a print out of the map of Canada and highlighting areas with different colored markers. It means leveraging sophisticated technologies to build territories based on key metrics like revenue goals, market opportunities, custom client information, government areas, proximity to salespeople’s base location, etc.

Territory Builder is a data visualization tool which allows you to group FSA/LDU (3 or 6 digit) postal codes or municipalities together to create equitable sales territories easily.   Built especially with non-technical people in mind, this Cloud-based visualization portal is powered by DMTI’s powerful Location Hub® Viewer module that automatically cleanses your data before displaying it on a map. With Territory Builder, visualizing and building territories on a Canadian map is as easy as uploading a CSV file of addresses or geographic information and using 3 or 6 digit postal codes to define boundaries.

And if your salespeople still think the territories are unfair, or launching a new product is shifting priorities, or you discover new sales opportunities in a region, you can easily manage and modify the boundaries. Since Territory Builder is a SaaS-based product, you can make live changes by reassigning postal codes to new territories.

Indeed, you cannot hope to optimally utilize your sales force and maximize profits unless you can picture the gap areas in your sales coverage clearly. DMTI’s Territory Builder is a powerful data visualization tool which will not only give you a more accurate view of your business, but it will also help you provide a fair challenge to your salespeople and drive home new revenue streams.

So, are you ready to increase the productivity and performance of your sales representatives?  Get in touch here.

Additional Reading:  

Territory Builder Brochure

Location Data

The Essential Equation: Data + Strategy

Telecom is an industry that’s particular reliant on accurate location data, and the industry’s marketing specialists recognize the value of leveraging data to empower campaign decisions. Marketing campaigns developed according to critical location-based data points allows Telecom marketers to make smart decisions that ultimately reduce efforts and waste of time and resources, while maximizing spend.

Before choosing a location intelligence platform to deliver spatial insights, it’s important to ensure you’re using valid, quality data. Using ‘dirty data’ (data that’s invalid and outdated) can result in wasted time, bad decisions and failed strategies. In fact, a recent survey from Gartner showed that poor data quality cost organizations an average of $15 million! Many marketers fail to assess the quality of their data, and end up using dirty data to inform important marketing campaigns. This means using data with incorrect inputs, or purchasing data in bulk, but allowing it to remain static rather than continually updating it.   This is especially true when it comes to address data, which tends to be outdated and/or inaccurate.

Avoid working off of poor address data by choosing a highly rated, reliable location intelligence platform. Location data is not static, and it’s essential to leverage a platform that continually updates information. Postal codes change, people move, rural areas become developed, people acquire or sell assets, demographics shift. A strong location intelligence platform assures quality of data by profiling information to reveal inconsistencies, and is continually performing data cleansing to fill in missing data and remove outdated and irrelevant information. A continually updated source of data means your team saves time by not having to store data on servers and then manually correct information or work with potential inconsistencies. Location intelligence platforms offer Telecom companies the ability to analyze location data to develop campaigns that are vastly more effective and productive.

Many marketers make the mistake of uploading these data points into their CRM tool or OSS/BSS, where they remain static. This “set it and forget it” system is highly ineffective, as location data is constantly changing. The accuracy of data points  is essential because they apply to a variety of marketing efforts, from finding new customers, serving existing customers, implementing effective digital automation, and providing top tier services.

Organizations should start by reviewing their own location data to determine where data needs to be validated for accuracy. A strong location intelligence platform is critical for developing marketing campaigns that achieve campaign objectives because it ensures data is continually updated and accurate. For example, batch cleansing address information cleans, validates and enriches addresses, in addition to adding geocodes. This is the key to identifying new revenue streams, while ensuring you’re maintaining a strong customer experience for existing customers.

Click here to learn how we can help your Telecom company optimize your location data.

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A telecom operator’s guide to selecting a 5G cell site with Location Intelligence

Location Intelligence

4 Ways Location Intelligence Optimizes Telecom Service Fulfillment

Automation tools are rising in just about every industry, including Telecom. Customers expect fast responses to their questions, and they want services fulfilled quickly and efficiently.  Delivering on these expectations requires location data that easily integrates with your customer service platforms.

Here are 4 ways a location intelligence platform like DMTI Spatial can ensure optimal automation services using precise, highly accurate location data.

Self-Service Automation

Customers increasingly expect self-service features from service provider websites. Integrating spatial data allows you to personalize location-based prompts that trigger customers to take a certain action or get answers to their questions. Everything from scheduling a service call, to getting a quote for service or requesting activation can be done more effectively online by integrating location data with your web service platform.

Order Management

Location intelligence optimizes service quality by leveraging a unique address identifier (UAID) to help reduce miscommunication with customers and improve responsiveness of customer service. Customer service representatives are able to respond quickly and accurately when they have instant access to location data. For example, helping customers discover whether their order is on, off or near the network.  This helps determine serviceability or whether there are regulatory restrictions that could impact an order.

Billing

Location data plays an important role in optimal billing services. Your location intelligence platform will ensure that your system is continually updated with correct customer address information. Additionally, you can add a layer of data to show where services are available and how much they cost to make sure all customers are being billed accurately.

Service Activation

Use location data to ensure services are delivered quickly and accurately. Service installs can fail if technicians have incomplete network records, including inaccurate address information and network inventory. For example, you can map out where services are available so that technicians know whether they are able to install services requested by customers (rather than arrive onsite only to discover a particular function or feature is not available in that given area). Additionally, you can use location data to map out optimal routing for service technicians so that they have correct address information, reach customers on time, and are able to spend less time on the road and more time providing services.

DMTI Spatial provides a range of features that can integrate with operations systems, click here for more information on how we can help your Telecom company optimize service fulfillment.

 

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Marketing and Location Intelligence

3 Ways Brick-and-Mortar Stores Are Using Location Intelligence

Many brick-and-mortar stores suffered financial losses in recent years due to the ease and efficiency of online shopping. While some businesses view the rise of online shopping as the ultimate enemy, innovative businesses are using the shift in consumer shopping habits as an opportunity to develop new and exciting incentives for driving traffic into their stores.

Omnichannel marketing is a powerful way for brick-and-mortar businesses to leverage multiple marketing channels to drive greater brand awareness, in-store traffic, and sales. Location based insights are at the core of this, helping businesses illustrate their unique value proposition and provide fun and fresh ways for customers to engage with their brand.

Here’s how successful brick-and-mortar stores drive foot traffic and generate sales using location intelligence:

Leverage Geofencing:

  • Gain competitive insights: Conduct trade area analysis by placing geofences around competitors to reveal how often your customers visit them. You can pair this with tracking competitor deals and incentives to gain knowledge on how to steer customers back to you…or keep them from visiting competitors in the first place.
  • In-store incentives: If your customers allow notifications, you can deliver limited time pop-up ads every time they are within a certain distance from your store, or an extra deal when they are about to leave your store.  Input customer data: Location intelligence platforms allow you to input customer information, useful for developing targeted marketing campaigns. This includes precise mailing addresses and detailed demographic information.

Precise direct mail campaigns:

Studies show that direct mail ROI is strong when marketers use omnichannel marketing methods to deliver a seamless and personalized customer experience to match lifestyles with customer buying trends. Pairing digital intelligence with direct mail can produce powerful results. Location technology delivers detailed demographic information along with accurate postal codes so that you are delivering the right message to the right people rather than wasting time and money on consumers that are unlikely to be interested in your product or service.

Location-based insights for site selection:

For brick and-mortar stores looking to open a new shop or to relocate, location intelligence platforms provide essential information on ideal locations. This includes demographic data, a historic view of how an area has changed over time, new developments, nearby points of interest, and much more.

Using location technology and the powerful insights it provides helps businesses integrate marketing channels for an omnichannel marketing approach. This leads to precise messaging and a highly compelling customer-centric experience that will have customers regularly engaging with your business on and offline.

To learn more download our guide Using Location Based Insights for Omnichannel Marketing

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