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Retail Store Site Selection Location Data

5 Ways Canadian Retailers Should Be Using Location Data and Technology

Read to know why location technology and location data sets are indispensable weapons in any retailer’s artillery

Location Data and the Telecom Industry

Top 5 ways the Telecom sector is leveraging Location Data

Read to know why 70% of telecom companies are convinced that accurate location data is critical to their success

A telecom business has to face a range of burning questions on a regular basis: Where are my customers? Where is my crew needed the most? Where do I need to expand capacity? Where is my network lacking quality? Each of these questions has a foundation in spatial information.

For an industry as competitive as telecommunications, understanding relationships, trends, and patterns in a quick and efficient way is imperative to keep up with the evolving market dynamics. Location data helps telecom operators to visualize the myriad layers of data in a manner which is easy to understand and interpret. But even more importantly, it helps unlock pertinent insights previously not available to the business. So, it’s not surprising that the 2018 Location Intelligence Market Study by Dresner Advisory Services pegs location data as a key success factor for 70% of telecom companies.

Let’s discuss some of the most profitable ways in which the telecom sector is leveraging location data…

1.  Market Segmentation

Location data is the underpinning of all market segmentation activities like identifying high-revenue areas, segregating customers on the basis of their demography and buying behaviour, ascertaining where new building projects are coming up, or even undertaking a competitor analysis. Prudent telecom operators are using location data to boost their intelligence with customer profiling and determine the potential of the market correctly. This further allows them to determine where new capital investment needs to be allocated and where marketing budgets should be channeled for maximum impact.

2.  Network Analysis

Using accurate location data gives operators and crew instant access to customer details, enabling them to map signal quality information with their user base and identify where the signal strength is good or poor. Being able to visualize assets geographically also allows for better monitoring of the network and expedition of maintenance and repairs. And when it comes to making inroads into an already competitive market, precise location data helps telecom companies to identify new market opportunities in the proximity of their assets and expand network capacity in a cost-effective manner. Which brings us to the next point in our list…

3.  Capacity Planning

To plan and manage their capacity judiciously, telecom companies not only need to be able to map their current user base properly, they should be able to locate the pockets of future growth meticulously. Using location data, companies can zero in on new prospects by leveraging insights into current profitable customers to look for similar prospects. Here, the intelligence derived through market segmentation activities also comes into play. Location data analytics provide a solid decision-support ground for capital investments.

4.  Serviceability

The importance of providing a definitive and timely service cost assessment for new customers is not lost on progressive telco businesses. Accurate address information gives the sales team the confidence to upsell products without worrying about the availability of those services. When it comes to analyzing and tracking the serviceability for commercial accounts, telcos can easily map location information against serviceability and make sure a new customer opportunity does not turn into a bad customer service problem. Businesses can even plan to increase serviceability based on the competitive insights derived from authentic location data.

5. Customer Service

Effective customer relationship management gives a much-needed competitive edge to telecom companies. Having a unique address identifier  for each customer can eliminate communication errors and boost the speed and quality of customer handling. By resolving user queries and complaints in a timely manner, operators can improve the relationship between the company and the customer, thereby reducing the chance of a customer jumping to another provider (churning). They can also make significant cost savings by reducing the need for return visits by the field crew.

In a nutshell, location data is a strategic planning tool the telecommunications industry can use to enhance its capabilities, reduce errors, and carry out processes more accurately. Forward-thinking telcos are already using location data to improve market penetration and enhance their network design and coverage. To know more about how your telecom business can leverage location data for better operational efficiency and customer satisfaction, contact us.

Additional Reading:

 

Customer Experience

How Spatial Technology is Transforming Customer Experiences in the Insurance Industry

Using Spatial Technology to Improve the Customer Experience in the Insurance Industry…While Increasing Profits

Customer experience in the insurance industry is a hot topic, and it’s easy to see why. A strong customer experience is the key to growth and profitability, requiring many companies to focus on differentiating their customer experience to stay ahead of the competition. However, despite the obvious benefits of cultivating happy customers, many insurance providers struggle with how to deliver a great customer experience and increase profits.

You must find ways to maintain the integrity of your business alongside ways to serve customers better – because if you don’t someone else will. In a 2016 letter to his shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explained that being customer-centric is about staying ahead of customers and developing new ways to keep them happy. Bezos says that if you shift your focus from trying to create great customer experiences, then you’re already on your way down.

Insurance providers are concerned that providing better customer experiences could conflict with the established rules and processes they’ve developed for risk selection and pricing. This certainly doesn’t have to be the case. The solution is using a spatial technology platform that supports and strengthens existing workflows while helping develop meaningful digital experiences for customers.

Digital Customer Experience in the Insurance Industry

In today’s tech-enabled world, your customer’s digital experience plays a huge role in how they perceive your company. Your website is often a customer’s first touch-point with your company and will be the first time they assess if you can meet their needs. Studies show you’ve got less than 1 minute to convince website visitors whether or not they should try your product or service. In insurance, that translates to showing customers they can expect fair pricing and an efficient turnaround time.

That’s where your spatial technology platform comes in.

Use Spatial Technology to Deliver What Customers Want

People expect online experiences to be simple and intuitive and they are accustomed to instantly accessing the information they want. In the insurance industry, providing a great customer experience means being able to quickly deliver information or a plan for coverage. Leveraging a spatial technology platform enables automation and self-service, making the process of generating insurance quotes and pricing simple, fast and efficient.

More and more insurance companies are experiencing the transformative effects of automation, including improved accuracy and efficiency. Data gathered by customer inputs can be automatically delivered into your underwriting process, and remain consistent with the risk selection and pricing models developed by your company’s actuarial/risk group. A well-defined process can easily interface with a spatial technology platform to automate inputs for calculation resulting in instant assessment and pricing.

Spatial technology platforms deliver location-based insights, including tools like geocoding, digital mapping, data analytics and visual dashboards, helping insurers use location intelligence throughout the policy lifecycle to deliver on client needs without sacrificing profitability. Using automated workflows, your spatial technology platform will geocode addresses in real time providing high precision coordinates, and automatically cross reference this data with the appropriate risk factors within your risk assessment models and pricing engine.

In addition to improving profitability by streamlining customer’s access to plans and policies, spatial data paired with customer information can also be used to assess additional plans that consumers may not realize they could benefit from, therefore offering ample opportunity for your company to cross-sell or upsell additional plans and features.

Using Spatial Intelligence to Improve Risk Assessment and Pricing

A strong spatial technology platform provides the location-based insights and analytics necessary to support underwriting, exposure management and claims. This data allows you to improve auditability with defined automated rules and quickly aggregate and visualize location information for more effective and accurate analysis when determining risk.

Real time location intelligence helps insurers quickly respond to policy applications, catastrophic events, and claims with greater accuracy. The ability to apply geographic coordinates (geocoding) to the property of interest offers insurers the ability to associate complex data sets with those coordinates, enabling deeper insights on concentration risk and exposure to hazards. This includes earthquakes, flooding, windstorms and more. These insights can better enable no-touch, low-touch adjudication processes, or provide better insights through visualization for exception handling or portfolio risk analysis.

Finally, the data on a strong spatial technology platform is continually updated to reflect the most current, precise location data, improving risk assessment to ensure accurate pricing.

DMTI Helps Insurance Companies Improve the Customer Experience

When it comes to developing a great customer experience in the insurance industry, it’s important to keep things simple. Companies now have the tools to gather data on what customers want and need to keep them happy, loyal to your brand, and refer you to other potential customers. Using spatial technology, you can manage and monitor risk exposure in real time, with complete location data on one platform.

DMTI is the gold standard for GIS and location-based data in Canada, offering insurers scalable on-demand tools that support real time workflows. DMTI Spatial’s Location Hub® & UAID® is the only solution of its kind in Canada, and supports you company’s risk assessment process by delivering data visualization tools, and data delivery infrastructure to provide high-precision location accuracy.

Click here to find out how DMTI will help your insurance company experience greater growth and profitability.

mapping condo concentration

3 Reasons Why Mapping Condo Concentration Matters

The construction rate of multi-family dwellings in Canada shows record highs being posted in the last 5 years. This presents some unique challenges when analyzing data sets. Multiple units can exist within a single address, an important consideration when mapping and developing your analysis.

Let’s review 3 potential issues and what to do about them.

Mapping multifamily construction

The Impact on Infrastructure

Condos require services, meaning they will draw heavily on existing infrastructure. The Ministry of Government and Consumer Services, for example, commissioned a report on elevator availability and maintenance. The request for proposal, which was issued by the Technical Standards and Safety Authority states “Ontario is currently experiencing one of the largest construction booms in residential properties in North America (and) a rapid growth in the number of elevators.”

High-rise construction requires specific planning of services, as higher densities can break traditional models that are based on regional boundaries. The ability to sketch out the density caused by high rise building enables analysts to better define territories in modelling out future service requirements.

Book of Business Modelling

Over 109,000 condo units were added to the downtown Toronto market since 2010. Insurers have an ever increasing need to model their current and prospective business against the current condominium market. This will ensure they are not over or under represented in certain buildings.  This can be challenging for any new building to ensure proper targeting of new business and ensure current business are not overrepresented.

The following graphic shows the state of condominium builds since 2010 in the city of Toronto – note the variability in the number of units in each area – and the resulting impact on any book of business.

Toronto's five decades of condo growth, mapped

Marketing to Highly Profitable Clients

The opportunity for utility and telco to maximize profitability is high in the condominium and multi-family dwelling market.  You’ll be able to bring services to a high number of users with minimal expense. It does, however, require marketers to target end users accurately and understand who is within reach.

This is an opportunity that plays out across major markets throughout Canada.  The following chart shows the expectation of continued higher production of multi-family starts vs. single-detached for the city of Calgary.

CMHC Forecast-Summary

Marketers and operations managers have an excellent opportunity to combine their current client data with accurate location intelligence data. This will help them understand where new, profitable business opportunities are emerging across the country.

Check out the new DMTI / Teranet Condo Concentration Insights offering here if any of these business scenarios apply to you.

Here are helpful links if you are looking for Mexico Business Data, U.S. Real Estate Tools or U.S. GIS Mapping Technology

Using data to find your ideal customer

How well do you really know your customers?

“They don’t know that we know that they know we know!” – Phoebe Buffay

What do you know? About your customers that is.

Most likely you have assumptions and these assumptions are often backed by data. Perhaps a survey that was conducted a few years ago, or through your experience with your clients first hand. Regardless of how you have acquired this intel, what you think you know about your customers is what should drive your business. But does it?

Effective Market Analysis to Target Your Ideal Customer

Who is your ideal customer? Your absolutely worst customer? Who would you be lucky to nab this quarter? Who could be your Lighthouse Customer?

These questions swim around every Marketer’s, Sale’s and Product Manager’s brain when building new marketing campaigns or planning new sales initiatives. The reality is, we think we have a good idea but may not have enough data to back it up.

Try googling “Ideal Customer”. A lot of businesses think they know the secret formula, but it should be you who determines who is ideal for your business.

Ask yourself these questions:

  • Who do I want to be partnered with?
  • Will I take any customer? Or do I want to portray a branded image?
  • Do I want to grow my business from the outside-in?
  • Does my database contain updated and accurate information about my customers?

Once you have begun to identify who your target customer should be, let the data tell you otherwise. From our experience at DMTI Spatial™ the data often surprises our clients. Most are unaware their database contains inaccurate and outdated data. Often times CRM’s are not kept up to date when employee attrition or customer churn takes place. Your data is what drives your business, not the other way around.

Using the Right Technology for Customer Insights

Need help cleaning this mess up? Start with the basics. Cleanse your address database. Then, ensure your customer records are up to date. Are you customers current? If not, when did they leave?

Once you’ve done this, enrich the data with as much information as possible. What campaigns went out to these customers? When did we reach out to them last? Start with the basics and build a rich repository of data.

Your data is what makes your business unique. Leverage and exploit this well of information to determine who your actual ideal customer is.

Need help? That is where Location Hub® Analytics comes in.

To learn more about how location analytics can help your business, shoot us an email or give us a call at 1.877.477.3684 .

Developing Location Intelligence

Transforming Location Intelligence into Profit

Over the next few weeks, this blog series will provide an overview of some of the basic uses of location intelligence (LI) at an enterprise level, its capacity to optimize business processes, and its hierarchy of benefits that impact positively on profitability and competitiveness.

Here’s what readers can expect to learn:

Location Intelligence: Definition and Context

Some progressive organizations are starting to recognize the value of location as an organizing principle. They see how it is embedded in corporate information, and can be applied to current business problems. Through the use of location intelligence technology, these organizations are finding ways to leverage a latent asset.

As a result, telecommunications companies are improving the serviceability of products across their customer base to increase profitability, insurance companies are better understanding risk and pricing to contain costs, utilities are more accurately meeting compliance requirements, and civil authorities are improving threat detection and emergency management capabilities. These are just some of the applications at an enterprise level.

The strategic use of location intelligence is being propelled by several key business drivers, including the need to increase revenue while simultaneously contain or reduce costs. These strategic imperatives form two sides of the profitability equation, which location intelligence is well-suited to solve.

Location intelligence describes the capacity of an entity or organization to use the principles of location to organize, reason, plan and problem solve. It is not defined by the mere presence of location-enabled technology, but moreover by the degree information is enriched by the perspective of location and the successful integration of this information into a process of decision making.

Specifically, location intelligence is the capability to organize and understand complex phenomena through the use of geographic relationships inherent in all information. Applied in a business context, the outcomes are meaningful, actionable and can provide a sustainable competitive advantage. Building location intelligence successfully requires business specific domain knowledge, formal frameworks, and a relentless focus on desired business outcomes. It’s about transforming business processes and creating opportunities.

Dimensions of Location Intelligence

Location intelligence applications are generally industry specific. However, within that framework, uses can be sub-sorted into three sub-categories:

Enterprise decision support: enterprise applications, often vertically focused, that illuminate optimal business strategy. For example, a telecom company consolidating newly acquired customers can identify common customers and determine how to offer services to achieve the greatest value. An insurance company can link geography dependent risk elements such as proximity to a flood zone or density of coverage in specific neighborhoods to better contain costs, and mitigate or more accurately price for risk.

Customer service: applications that facilitate customer service and self-service to improve the overall customer experience.For example, a government agency can more efficiently measure service levels or plan for the distribution of services that are in many cases dependent on variables that change over space, such as household income or number of children. Governments may also be able to better protect constituents by applying location intelligence to existing workflows so as to enhance fraud detection or threat detection capabilities.

Consumer applications: enterprise applications that build loyalty among customers and influence purchasing behaviors. For example, retailers can execute store-specific promotions with more accuracy, and profile and target their markets, resulting in the identification of higher value customers. Or retailers may use location intelligence to augment loyalty program services via internet channels, as in neighbourhood smart store offerings.

Table 1.0 – Use scenarios for location intelligence by industry

Uses of Location Intelligence
Communications & Media Insurance and Finance Government Services
Marketing

  • micro-marketing
  • assessing penetration levels
  • identifying competitive threats
Portfolio Analysis

  • predictive analytics
  • pricing and loss reserving
  • assessing policy saturation
Address Management

  • address validation
  • data cleansing
  • data maintenance
Customer Service

  • pre-sales qualification
  • dispatch efficiencies
  • multi-product eligibility
Marketing Services

  • property-level campaigns
  • neighbourhood context
  • repeat marketing tracking
Information Integration

  • improved data integrity
  • a “one client view”
  • reducing cascading error
Operations

  • customer serviceability
  • cost avoidance
  • network planning
Sustainable Compliance

  • risk assessment
  • improved monitoring
  • compliance auditing & reporting
Entity Authentication

  • fraud detection
  • risk profiling and scoring
  • advanced analytics

Up Next: Challenges, Drivers and the Need for Location Intelligence 

Understanding location-based marketing

The Continued Rise of Location-Based Marketing

Location-based marketing is helping a whole new generation of marketers understand how using data helps them better find, target and message to their best prospects and customers.

A report from Juniper Research estimates that revenues from the Mobile Context and Location Services market will reach $43.3B by 2019 almost 4x the current market valuation at this point.

But how should marketers leverage location to better understand and reach their customer base?

How to Leverage Location to Understand Customers

The first thing to take into consideration is the accuracy of your location data, or the location data of your ad provider. Paying for ads that are presented to someone who is nowhere near your location defeats the entire purpose of location-based messaging.

According to a study published by ThinkLinear in July of this year:

“The problem is that, on average, only 34% of ad requests that include latitude and longitude data are accurate within 100 meters of a user’s location. That means advertisers are paying to target a user in a specific location, but the person isn’t really there. Advertisers aren’t getting what they paid for, performance suffers, and the whole industry ends up looking bad.”

In these types of instances, providers like DMTI Spatial are able to bring their GIS knowledge to the table to help – transforming traditional address data into geocoded roof-top accurate locations to ensure that advertisers have a much more accurate data set to work with.

How Different Demographics Use Location-Based Services

The second element to consider is how people access and leverage location based services.  For example, a recent survey posed by the Location Based Marketing Association (LBMA) titled “The Internet of Things: The Future” found that:

Women are slightly more likely than men (54 percent vs. 47 percent) to share data from their connected car in exchange for location-based coupons or discounts.

Men are more likely than women (33 percent vs. 22 percent) to share data from their connected car if informed of potentially interesting locations along their route.

These behavior patterns mirror what we as marketers might expect from the non-location marketing based world, but are worth taking into consideration when considering the use of location-based marketing to reach out to your customers.  Who are you looking to target, and what information do they want to receive from you on their mobile device.

The combination of behaviour and location are quickly pulling marketers, particularly in the retail space, to focus on location-based offers.  The launch of the Apple iBeacon and Google Glass last year are heralding a new era of communications as customer visit retail locations.  Large brands, including the Bay, Lord & Taylor and others are leveraging the new iBeacon technology, along with location intelligence to message to potential customers.  And it appears that the public is interested too – 77% of us are OK with sharing our location information while we shop, and 81% of those receiving mobile messaging read those messages.

Does your organization have precise location data for your customers?  How will your organization take on the brave new world of location-based marketing? Click here to learn more about how DMTI helps marketers leverage location data to increase the ROI of marketing campaigns.

What CRM Tools have to do with a Bugatti

Would you put low octane gas in your Bugatti?

Of course you wouldn’t, that would be unheard of! You would spend more to ensure you’re powering it with high octane fuel. The car would still run with lower quality gasoline, but its performance would suffer. CRM tools are similar to sports cars. They’re expensive and powerful, but they’re limited by how they’re powered.

The Mistake Companies Make with CRM Tools

Many companies spend thousands of dollars annually on their corporate CRM system. It’s the engine that drives them, and as a marketer, you rely on it daily. Yet with such a large spend and high importance, many organizations don’t spend enough effort ensuring the quality of information captured inside.

Customer, prospect and partner information is the fuel of the CRM. Poor data quality leads to communications breakdowns, slower transactions, ineffective analysis and wasted time. Studies show that inaccurate information can result in a 30% revenue decrease.

With interconnected systems, CRM data flows into other tools including financial and marketing systems, multiplying the impact of incorrect information. There are a number of causes of poor quality data. Manual user errors lead to missing or incorrect information. Combining multiple sources of data results in inconsistencies and a lack of standardization.

How does your organization ensure it’s working with the highest quality data in its CRM system? Click here for more information on leveraging the right market data for your CRM system.

Customer Insights and Location Data

Unlock Customer Insights with Location Intelligence

In today’s crowded marketplace, there is immense pressure on marketers to deliver customer insights that lead to new opportunities. These insights increase revenues and differentiate their product offering through successful campaign initiatives. One powerful example is the impact bad data can have on marketing efforts. In this use case, we look at current address information.

Impact of Current Address Information on Marketing

140 million addressed mail pieces don’t make it to the intended recipients and 70% of undeliverable mail is attributed to people who have moved. This means marketers must leverage accurate location information to their competitive advantage.

Successful customer insights begin with accurate and current address information to increase campaign effectiveness. Marketers can expect to see an increase in ROI by approximately 5% and reduce operational costs associated with erroneous data. Location Intelligence empowers marketers with the means to assess the ‘who’ and ‘where’ when maximizing marketing decisions.

Success begins with accurate and current address information to increase campaign effectiveness, increase ROI by approximately 5% and reduce operational costs associated with erroneous data.

View our video on Location Intelligence to see how it empowers marketers with the means to assess the ‘who’ and ‘where’ when maximizing marketing decisions.

Click here to see how DMTI’s market analysis tools help marketers