The 'where' factor: How is location awareness revolutionising CRM?

Like most technologies, CRM was overhyped in the early days, but has now matured to become a trusted and critical delivery element of competitive enterprise strategies. Today, CRM applications are witnessing reinvigorated growth, underpinned by multi-dimensional data, extended via web services, and driven by the fundamental business need to acquire, serve and grow customers. 

 

In the public sector, Government CRM systems capture service request details, route the request to the proper agency, track workflow progress, and measure performance. This coordinated approach helps to improve agency efficiency and bridge municipal silos. In the private sector, commercial CRM systems use a consumer-centric approach, focusing on acquiring and retaining customers through data capture to enhance customer retention with the goal of a 360-degree view of the consumer. 

 

However, both CRM approaches are missing a fundamental element – location.

 

Location is ubiquitous. Location influences most (if not all) business behaviour and outcomes, making its applicability almost universal. Yet many organisations have not thought about the geographic and location aspects of their business data across processes or decision making. In short, this lack of location awareness is an analytic blind spot for the majority of organisations today.

 

According to Ovum, 80% of enterprise data contains geospatial co-ordinates that can be visualised on a map as points, lines or areas. However, this location component of data is not being capitalised on by many organisations and IT systems. Traditional business intelligence systems have looked at ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’, but have ignored the core analytical dimension of ‘where’. Location is a core analytic dimension. Within this data lies a vast pool of intelligence that largely remains untapped today. In fact, only 28% of organisations are truly innovative in their business when it comes to the context of location. (Ventana Research – Benchmark Research into Location Intelligence – Feb 2009). The same report found that 61% of organisations found that using location data helps to improve customer services.