As you can imagine I have been to many presentations and many events and depending on what is being discussed about business at the time, the one thing that generally is agreed on is that your customer is your biggest asset.
We might have seen the approach to business change with the implementation for technology over the past 20 years, and I sometimes wonder how any business got done when you were reliant on field sales and the postal service, but it did. I’m guessing the reason it got done, is the fact that the principals of business have not changed. What I mean is, we all make product or offer services and sell these to either other businesses or consumers. We seek to build relationships with our customers and build brand loyalty with customers around our products and service.
Technology might have changed our approach to business activity and it still is, as consumers now have access to far more choice through the internet, but those customers that engage and buy into your message, product and brand are going to become assets for your business.
Managing your customers in today’s modern business world relies on great technology, connected systems and clean data. The days of recording things on “post it notes” or index cards is long gone. I remember at the start of my career as a software engineer, the new kid on the block was the “relational database” yes, I’m that old.
Why are technology changes, so continuous?
We tend to just accept most of it, the new phone, the new laptop, but every now and again a technology emerges that we all get excited about. This might be a social media offering, a communication technology or something like geospatial that is beginning to offer businesses great insight into customer data, and activity.
I may have had the pleasure of working with a range of different customers over the past 21 years and seen many technology changes. Since 2011 my company has helped different customers benefit from visualisation of data with maps using geospatial tools. In late 2019 we brought to market our latest mapping and geospatial platform.
To answer the question of why technology change is continuous, we all innovate and try to find new ways to make our businesses more competitive and efficient. Cloud computing and cloud services have brought a new dimension to sharing and working in a flexible way, allowing teams to access data and understand data more effectively this includes the use of geospatial technology.
How does Geospatial help in business?
It’s a great question because as we all know, maps are nothing new but when you combine different technologies, systems and data and then geospatial service, it is then you can start to understand data across your enterprise easily. Geospatial services can help your business in a number of ways, and in each improvement can help build customer loyalty with your brand or service.
Thinking about Sales
Your sales team want to, and you need them to close as much business as possible, as it is what they are paid to do. By giving your team access to the right information in the right way and by being able to relate information by location, your sales team, especially field sales can schedule and plan to see which customers they see, when. By bringing customer data and analytical data from website visits together your sales teams can see which customers are viewing your information. Then there is prospecting using services that deliver business data on look-up allowing you to prospect without having to buy costly marketing lists.
With geospatial tools your teams could access not just your customer database but much more, building a view built on multiple sets of data by location.
Thinking about Marketing
Marketing activity is not just about posting on social media and sending emails or hard copy in the post. Marketing is driven by data. With geospatial your marketing teams have access to all the business data by location and they can build effective campaigns, events and targeted messages by region or by sales territory, stopping any crossover of offers, or blanket marketing to existing customers, which we all really dislike as consumers of a service.
Thinking about analytics
Data drives business and helps you with decision making, but most analytical systems offer charting and allow you to slice up the data by field types. Very few vendors offer or remember that location intelligence also adds a huge amount of value to you and your business. Being able to identify data by location and then understand by type gives you an instant view of how a region or demographic area is performing, and then what measures might need to be taken.
Data makes happy customers
The purpose of any technology or systems is to bring value to your business, and to help in a given area. Mapping and geospatial bring this in abundance when used correctly with your systems and processes.
Geospatial is not just about mapping your data but about collaborating with your business systems and teams to help drive analytics, improve sales and marketing, and keep customers coming back to you. Data is now the new top commodity and you can achieve all sorts of things with great data.
Your customers need and want to be treated well and as a business you need to have efficient systems for planning, finance, customer and analysis. Our offering with Mapsimise can help you bring your systems together and all your data together, helping you to do more and make better decisions.
How to get started with Mapsimise
If you are ready to get started, it's so easy! Start visualising your data on one or more maps by signing up to your own Mapsimise account and get started. Follow the steps below:
1.Firstly, visit our website Mapsimise.com
2.Click Get Started
3.Select the package that suites your organisation
4.Fill in the registration form
5.Validate and log in to your Mapsimise account (by email)
6.Add your billing information and select the connectors or upgrade from your Go Package
If you get stuck, you can sign into the Help Desk and raise a ticket with Mapsimise Support OR click here.
We look forward to working with you and helping you visualise your data, gaining location intelligence.
