Location analytics – why businesses need it?
Almost everything about business exists at a particular time and location. It could be objects like raw materials, products, facilities, people like employees, agents, customers or events like deliveries, purchases, production runs. By understanding how these elements relate to one another through locational analytics, businesses can make more informed decisions that can improve both efficiency and effectiveness. Location analytics helps in understanding and targeting customers and understanding and optimizing business processes.
Location analytics enables retailers to achieve the following:
Improving return on investment
Location analytics can offer accurate insight into business performance and potential – fast. By coupling the right data (anything from store sales figures to customer service feedback) with highly accurate location information, you can see precisely where the business would best benefit from your scarce funds. Through techniques such as heat mapping, businesses can identify investment ‘hotspots’ at a glance, saving hours of time that would otherwise be spent going through spreadsheets and tables.
Increasing sales
Location analytics can help in increasing sales through targeted marketing. Locational analytics can help in fine-tuning the level of detail by combining data about buying patterns, psycho-demographics, even sentiment analysis all linked together by latitude and longitude. This analytics can significantly help the business in making targeted decisions at the group or individual level.
Controlling costs
Location analytics can aid in visualizing business performance, including business spending. It can not only help the business get details about regular expenses like marketing, wages or rent but also identify ‘hotspots’ of underperformance or inefficiency which could be incurring extra cost. Maps also make it quick to identify correlations and patterns between the data nationally, regionally, locally and all the way down to specific stores, in order to identify previously hidden sources or triggers of cost.
Location analytics can also significantly help in lowering costs and mitigating risks in supply chain management. Probably the most well-known applications are around the optimum siting of facilities and assets. For example, transfer facilities, warehouses and distribution centers, inventory, where you put your trucks and planes and railcars, and right on down to retail locations. Location analytics can also help in routing or rerouting in real time in response to traffic patterns.
Boosting customer satisfaction
Building customer relationships and loyalty to a great extent includes customizing products and services and communications to segments, and to individuals. Locational analytics helps in serving customers better, to meet their expectations and deliver what was promised as it helps in easily identifying who the customers are and where they are. Using location-based data, businesses can very quickly isolate the root cause of customer service issues. They can also identify whether there are any patterns in customer service problems across a geographical area.
The benefits location analytics can offer to a business are numerous. It can help it to see at a glance exactly how many stores to run and in which locations, where it is over and underspending, how efficiently each stage of the supply chain is working etc. By finding all this information, a business can be more efficient and effective.
Source : ttps://www.geospatialworld.