In today’s competitive world, it is not at all enough to just know who your customers are. It is equally important to know, where they are. Increasing integration of location based services and information with the existing CRM provides tremendous benefits for your sales team.
Traditionally, CRM system has focussed only on the Who, What and When aspects, but now there is also need to focus on the Where aspect.
Businesses are already collecting a list of data points about each of their customers. So, it should not be much of a stretch for them to start collecting data about their customer geo locations.
Now, let us look on what are the perks or the importance of tracking location-based data of consumers:
- Location will be one of the important portions of information about customers a brand could get. It gives information about the content of advertising as well as the method.
- Location is most important as it gives you context. If all the information you have is about what has been bought by a consumer previously, then you might be able to spot out only some patterns, such as the info that an individual buys certain chemicals on a weekly basis. But, even this tells you very limited information about what encourages someone to do something. But, if you are able to track and keep location data on top and send an ad for that chemical to that individual when next time they are close to that chemical store, then you suddenly have a better chance of converting that individual.
- There is an oft-cited statistics that 80% of the data gathered has a geospatial element in it. What it means by this is that there is need to see it in context, not correspondingly only to individuals, but to the location also. Currently, there are some services that let firms to slab data on top of the maps; making it convenient to visualize CRM data for targeting geographically and for getting location-based insights.
- Using customers’ geo location data allows advertisers to be proactive in reaching them, in place of relying on records of past interactions which are entirely on the customers own conditions. No matter how much time we spend online, a majority of it is spent out in the real world only. That means, firms can reach more customers more effectively by cutting overall online noise and reaching people on the streets.
- Maintaining and developing relationships with customers can be boosted up with the addition of GPS in the current CRM system. The most interesting application of GPS is in fleet management and in the delivery of services. With a well developed CRM solution integrated with GPS system, the CRM representatives can allocate jobs, especially in the case of a mobile sales rep or maintenance staff- to the representative closest to the customer.
However, firms should keep in mind that location is important, but is still only one part of a compelling strategy. You might be able to know someone position, but if your creativity fails, it may fall flat all the same.
Just as CRM systems like Xobber which has variant excellent features in it, completely converts the relationship between business and customer, location also has the power to redefine that relationship again.