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.
Additional Reading:
6 Ways Bad Address Data is Impacting Your Business
Much attention is typically paid to ensuring your customer contact information is accurate – that is names, phone numbers, and emails. But how much effort are you spending on your address data?
Despite your best efforts, it’s hard to stay on top of address updates. Even with strong address governance, correct information at the time of entry can quickly change. Between municipal amalgamations, street name and postal code changes, millions of addresses are affected every year in Canada. Studies have shown that 85% of all business data has a location component associated with it, and with complex analytics and “big data” becoming more popular, the quality of your address data is now more important than ever.
The impacts of incomplete, inaccurate and out-of-date address data can be numerous:
- Reduced insight into the locations of your current customers, making segmentation, market analysis, accumulation, and exposure analysis more difficult.
- Increased costs of acquiring new customers as it becomes more difficult to identify optimal segments for marketing campaigns.
- Missed opportunity by not being able to accurately identify potential customers that are within your trade area or close to existing infrastructure who are eligible for your products, services or special offers.
- Inefficient site planning as you may not be able to accurately geographically locate where your existing customers are and where the ideal location is to attract potential new customers.
- Mismanagement of your sales territories as you may not be able to accurately ensure that you have the correct coverage based on the location of your sales staff and your customers.
- Increased IT costs and systems overhead due to managing and reconciling multiple disparate databases with duplicate address entries.
DMTI is Canada’s expert when it comes to address quality. We offer a variety of solutions to help your organization ensure it’s working with the best quality address data available when you need it.
- Ensure address accuracy upon entry to your enterprise business systems by integrating Location Hub®’s Address Suggest service into your address data capture screens.
- Ensure address accuracy and improve address context in process by integrating Location Hub Address Recognition and Geocoding service into your transactional business systems.
- Ensure address database currency and accuracy in batch by cleaning, correcting and standardizing all your addresses at once with Location Hub.
Wondering how accurate your address data is? Find out with our Free Address Quality Assessment, click here to learn more.
Additional Reading:
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.
Additional Reading:
A telecom operator’s guide to selecting a 5G cell site with Location Intelligence
4 Ways to Visualize, Build and Manage your Territories for Canada
Territory management is a process that helps organizations by defining geographical territories based on factors such as sales, infrastructure locations and service delivery zones. Companies are managing this type of information today within spreadsheets and require a solution that helps build and visualize territories based on key metrics like revenue goals, market opportunities, custom client information, government areas, proximity to salespeople’s base location, etc.