The concoction of two factors, time and location, can make or mess up a situation.
From a business point of view, if you are at the right location at the right time, you can probably save your business reputation and elevate your customer experience.
Not all your plans and strategies work for all locations. Despite all the client data, you should know how to use it at the right time. You can’t sell winter jackets in cities having temperatures over 100 F. You need to at least wait for winter. But till then, you can target places with a cold atmosphere.
You are using Dynamics 365 CRM; you are already one step ahead of a lot of business. But, understandably, CRM data is hard to visualize if you don’t have proper insights.
There are extensions that can help you visualize all the location data on maps. You will have more clarity on which regions have most of your clients and if you have sufficient infrastructure (if applicable) to fulfill the demands of all those clients, etc.
Let’s find out how different industries can benefit from adding some advanced features to Dynamics 365 map.
- Transportation Industry
The transportation industry solely depends on the locations. Many businesses use Dynamics 365 CRM to store and manage all their data. The major concern of these business owners is how to reduce fuel consumption. They always try to reduce the total miles in order to reduce fuel costs.
We all know that fuel prices are highly uncertain. Any national/international emergencies can shoot up the fuel charges. We cannot control the fuel charges, but we can try to reduce the total miles.
Let’s understand this scenario with an example. Suppose you are an owner of a courier company. You will have a number of boxes to transport every day. Your team spends their whole day delivering the packages to their destinations.
Delivering packages to new locations sometimes gets challenging. Some locations are hard to find or do not allow trucks. It takes longer routes to reach certain locations. This takes a lot of their time, and they are not able to finish their daily delivery targets.
We all use either Google Maps or Apple Maps. But delivery agents have lots of different destinations. It is uncomfortable or them to fetch the data from CRM and add the address to maps. When they add addresses one by one, they cannot realize that some destinations might be nearby and they can deliver the package in one go.
This issue can be resolved with route optimization functionality. It will cover all the destinations in the shortest distance. Moreover, it will also avoid traffic, road closures, roads that avoid heavy vehicles, etc. When the delivery reps are assigned targets, route optimization uses all these locations and forms a route.
The optimized routes also show the estimated reaching time at all the locations. Thus, the delivery guys can have a call with the clients and check their availability. Using such features in Dynamics 365, a business can reduce fuel costs upto 20% or higher if your business has a more complex delivery structure.
- Finance Industry
All kinds of industries have tough competition, and the finance industry is one of them. Today, we have a lot of banks and insurance companies ready to offer better service than others. So, all institutions try to offer customers the best they can to convince them to stick with them.
You might have a question about how maps can help financial institutions. Well, they can do a lot with all their customers’ location data. CRM might not be an ideal place to visualize all that data.
Here is one example to make you understand how maps can help finance bodies. All banks have ATMs in specific parts of the city. Mostly around popular places with more crowds. But if you want to improve your customer service, you would also like to install ATMs near their homes.
If you can figure out a location where most of your customers live, it would be nice to install an ATM somewhere near. When you have all your client locations on a map, you can easily finalize the regions that should have an ATM.
The other way of using it is to use it for query resolution. For example, getting complaints from one specific ATM about a low cash balance means more users are using that ATM. Either install a new one nearby that region or fill the previous one with more cash.
To avoid such complaints in future and to always serve the best customer experience, banks can use location intelligence and analyze data in a much better way. They can take proactive actions by filling the ATMs with more cash in areas with more clients to avoid any complaints in the future.
- Pharma Industry
Pharma companies have medical representatives who visit doctors and medical store owners to explain their products and bring sales. If they have any new product, feedback from doctors matters a lot as that would help them improvise.
Sales reps have to schedule meetings with the doctors to discuss the products. But there is a chance that sales reps don’t reach the destination on time. Pharma companies often get complaints that their sales reps never visited them. However, the sales reps might have shown they have visited all the clients they were assigned, or they would show the doctor’s unavailability.
This contradiction impacts companies’ image. Managers can’t call their teammates every hour to know whether their schedule is on time or not. Next time, the doctor might not approve any appointment request from your company.
However, you can add a feature to track check-in and check-outs for all the meetings. The sales reps have to check in when they reach the client location and check out once they are done with the meeting. Managers can view all the timings and reports of any of the meetings.
However, there are still chances that the sales reps will enter false entries. It has an advanced geofencing feature to ensure no false entries. Geofencing does not allow sales reps to log in from anywhere else. So, managers can track meetings that are going on or are about to happen.
- Telecommunication Industry
The telecommunication industry is all about connecting people at different locations. They have huge infrastructures built at various locations. Their only goal is to provide uninterrupted service. They need to keep track of all the network towers and other infrastructure because, in case of any failure, they should have a team nearby to fix it.
Let us take an example to understand the situation even more. If a telecom company receives a complaint from a specific region that network services are not working properly. If the reason behind this is a natural calamity like heavy rainfall, earthquakes, etc., there are chances that other infrastructure in that same region might have been affected.
You send your team to get the tower fixed. They complete their work and come back. Within half an hour, you have another complaint from the same region but now for different infrastructure. You must send your team to that area again to fix the issue.
You could have taken proactive action and asked your team to check all the nearby towers. Your customers would have received uninterrupted service.
To provide an excellent user experience to your customers, you can use geolocation data to find nearby clients. Proximity search helps your team locate all the nearby installations of your company, be it network towers or any other infrastructure. So, when they receive one complaint, and if there are chances that nearby areas might be affected due to rains or whatsoever region, the team can check all that beforehand.
You do not have to wait for others to complain to solve the issue. Your proactive attitude can help you provide the best customer experience, which makes your brand different from others.
[H2]Wrapping Up
If your business includes visiting clients’ locations or services around them, using location intelligence is a perfect way to upgrade your services. Any business can certainly improve its customer service experience using it. It will ease your sales and marketing teams a lot in taking decisions.