With the vision of the future coming closer to reality, businesses are capturing a huge share of the market by giving you what you want, when and where you want it. In simple words, businesses are using the power of ‘where’ also known as location analytics. The power of location analytics helps organizations get rid of data gaps and figure out their blind spots.
What’s different here is businesses are collecting addresses, ZIP codes, service routes, street networks and much more. Location analytics puts this data to better use starting from comparing sales revenue based on the territory to assessing market campaigns. Giving businesses a sure shot way to figure out where the customer lives to determine where to open stores and distribute products.
Retail, real estate, healthcare, education, government, planning, digital, safety, oil & petroleum- every industry benefits from location analytics. For example- Government agencies can provide taxpayers a full list of where and how they spend their money. Firefighters will have the floor plan before entering the building that is on fire. All this is now possible because every system, desktop, mobile app is taking advantage of location.
While it is still a new concept, it is catching up quite fast with businesses. There are four fundamental areas that will make a difference and businesses are taking advantage of each of them in order to take their performance to a whole new level.
Beyond Simple Maps:
Integrating location-based services into their existing system which is just the beginning. Maps answer more than just the location. It can convert the structure and unstructured data into intelligence. For example- if you simply map millions of customers to a region, it becomes clustered and does not provide any useful insight. Instead, you could use color mapping, data aggregation, and heat mapping.
Enrich your view of the world:
You can go beyond data with Geo Enrichment by combining demographic, lifestyle, consumer spending and data to get a geocentric view. For example- you could get some information about your customer from a CRM or sales data but it does not supply you with lifestyle information of customers like what do your customers do for fun or where do they vacation?
Map-driven analysis:
It lets you ask questions from the data and look into charts and graphs for precise answers. Any changes that are made to charts or graphs are automatically shown on the map.
Collaborate with maps:
Maps span over centuries of human existence and are a perfect communication tool. They serve as a common information language. Maps allow management, sales, marketing, operations, analysts, and field staff to work together with the same visual information.
Location Analytics includes interactive, dynamic, and live data maps making it easy to share maps across mobile devices, in presentations, and across information systems. The control of the map is with the owner and defines the level of access for different levels of users.
Maps make our life easier and convenient. They help us find places and in this case, data and help us get to places with ease. Location Analytics is taking business and customer experience to new places. It is making discovery that is not possible with any other technology.
