Photo by Pushpins
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of businesses—be it retail or food and beverage—have embraced e-commerce. Brick-and-mortar stores have either expanded to online shops or have completely migrated to virtual selling, thus accelerating the adaption of e-commerce. With this shift comes a multitude of information available to business owners. How should entrepreneurs make use of such wealth of data for better customer service?
Sifting through all that influx of information is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Hence, it’s important to know what you should be looking for. Equally important is what you should do with all those details. Here’s how you can take advantage of location data for better customer service, so you can make your customers happy and grow your online business.
Create a more personalized shopping experience
An online presence doesn’t mean there’s no more opportunity to provide a more personalized customer service. Aside from utilizing information from customers’ purchase history, location data can also provide practical insights for a better shopping experience.
Food delivery services, like GrabFood, make best use of geolocation. GrabFood recommends nearby restaurants based on the user’s address. This ensures that food delivery is processed on time, with reasonable delay, if any. Some promotions are also based on the delivery address (for instance, users outside Metro Manila get a discount when they order on specific days).
You can also use to make better product recommendations. If, say, you are a fashion retail brand that caters to a worldwide audience, you wouldn’t want to recommend winter clothes to a frequent customer who lives in the tropics.
Understand customer sentiments
Customer feedback matters regardless of the industry you’re in. Aside from reviews customers leave directly on your products’ page, tracking sentiments on social media will give you valuable information on what your market genuinely feels about their shopping experience. Mentions of your brand, whether favorable or not, can aid you in determining what you need to improve and what you should retain.
For instance, if a significant number of customers from a specific area is complaining about delivery delays on Twitter, then it’s a must to check on what the issue is. This will enable you to easily identify any logistical issues and address them immediately.
Get to know them better
Running a successful business is like wooing someone: you get to know their likes and dislikes so you can impress them, hoping they’d like you back. In managing a business, though, wooing customers is a continuous process even after their first or second purchase.
Knowing exactly what your customers like is key to retaining them; the same applies if you want to attract new markets. Geographic information system (GIS), which mainly employs location data, is one of the powerful tools that allows you to build a comprehensive profile of your customers—what they’re interested in, how much they’re willing to spend, where they are, and even their habits. GIS arms you with a deeper understanding of your market, providing you with not just demographic information but also psychographic details. When you’re armed with such data, you’ll be able to increase customer equity across all market segments.
Give them what they want
Say, you sell bottled coffee, but you want to diversify your product offerings by adding some healthy teas into the mix. Based on your customers’ profiles, look for those who are more health-conscious—those who regularly go to the gym or are more inclined to order their coffee black, for instance. You can gather these sets of information from surveys. Furthermore, you can beef up your advertising efforts in places that can attract more health enthusiasts, like gyms and salad shops.
This granular approach ensures your message gets to the right audience, so you don’t end up promoting a product that only gets ignored.
Be where they are
Targeted marketing, versus mass marketing, guarantees that the budget you spend is not wasted on those who aren’t your brand’s audience. Using location data is an effective means to help you with this.
For example, your online shop’s statistics tell you that your sales aren’t doing well in Location A. Meanwhile, Location B is showing a slow but steady growth of new customers. Instead of spending more marketing and advertising money in Location A, funnel that budget to those in Location B to further attract more customers. You may also want to set up a warehouse in Location B to make sure deliveries are done efficiently.
It also pays to know what exact devices your customers use to browse your store. If most of them thumb through their phones, then make sure your website is well optimized for mobile browsing.
Location data, when used in conjunction with other data sets, is a powerful business intelligence tool that can help you better cater to your customers so you can grow your business. Just make sure to let your shoppers know you are collecting their information. Be transparent when it comes to how and where you’re using their personal data to avoid any data privacy infringement.
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Pushpins is a GIS company in the Philippines. Message us if you want to know more about location-based data and how we can help your business or organization.