Location intelligence

CHAPTER ONE

What is location intelligence?

Location intelligence is a form of business intelligence and a growing component of business data that, put simply, allows businesses to know everything about a specific location. This means that businesses and organisations are able to access insights on a property, postcode or area in order to gain a better understanding of the location itself and customers living there.

Innovative location-based services by experts, such as Loqate, help businesses to improve and maintain quality customer data, as well as increase conversion rates and drive business efficiency.

Taking advantage of location intelligence technology can help set businesses apart from the competition. Many are becoming attuned to the fact that consumers now demand personalised and relevant shopping experiences, and that it is with the help of location intelligence that this can be achieved.

How does location intelligence work?

In order to provide essential insights that can shed light on a wide array of information, regarding a property, postcode or area, clean and accurate location data is vital.

Quality data and enhanced data sets allow businesses to build an accurate picture of a customer’s property and the area in which they live, allowing them to significantly improve the customer experience and user journey.

On-demand services that use GPS, RFID and in-store beacons are now commonplace in enabling a more personalised, relevant experience, and are powered by location intelligence services.

Who can benefit from location intelligence data?

Working closely with Forrester, we discovered that over the next three years, 77% of firms believe location data will be important, critical, or extremely critical to their business, compared to 50% now. Firms are employing location intelligence across customer experiences areas, such as enhancing digital experience (71%) and mobile engagement (64%), to improve how they engage customers across all stages of the life cycle. 

Many types of businesses and organisations benefit from location intelligence data, including retailers, government, finance and fintech organisations, charities, insurance companies, travel and leisure companies, education establishments and more.

CHAPTER TWO

What are the main benefits of location intelligence data?

Retail

For retailers, location intelligence provides the ability to better understand customers, and, therefore, create an improved customer experience. Retailers realise that consumers all have their somewhere, and that this is more than simply a pin on the map. Now, many are using location data to build on their relationships with consumers, encouraging brand loyalty and trust, which are vital for multi-channel retailers.

Understanding address data and ensuring that new data is clean and accurate is essential for retailers whether their store is physical or online, as it means that parcels and communications are effectively delivered without the issue of an address not being found - which can be extremely costly for retailers and frustrating for shoppers. It is also used to aid store finder, so that customers know the distance to and address of their favourite retailers, providing information on red routes and the distance of a property from the road, and it is vital for effective ongoing sales and marketing efforts.

It isn’t just new data that retailers should be focusing their efforts on. Data already sitting in a database should also be considered. The longer a company waits to clean their customer data, the more it will cost them and the more difficult it will be.

Government

The benefits for governments are also enormous. Not only does it enable quick evaluation in the case of emergencies (i.e.natural disasters or crime), but it also helps improve infrastructure plans and allows a greater understanding of where services are required or are currently located. Location intelligence data can also be used by governments to a provide citizens with the information they require when looking into new areas to live or work.

Finance

The finance industry can also gain a wealth of value from location intelligence data. One of the main benefits for this location data in this industry is the detail it can provide around customer preferences and interests, and of course, customer relationships. It can also influence site selection and targeted marketing campaigns, product and service offerings and channel optimisation.

In our report, almost half of respondents in the financial services/ fintech sectors reported that location adds great value when engaging with customers in ways they never have before.

Insurance

Location intelligence data is vital for insurance companies as it helps them asses information including property type, number of bedrooms, bathrooms and floors, as well as the age of the property, all of which enables insurance companies to estimate risk and calculate premiums accordingly.

Not only this, but location intelligence data can also estimate a property footprint, the height of the building and whether it is a listed property, provide an indication of burglary rate for the area and an estimate of current value in that area.

Discover how Homelyfe Insurance increased its conversion rate by 80% using property intelligence data.

Real Estate

Location intelligence plays a huge role in retail estate. Not only does it allow you to accurately pinpoint a property on a map, it also provides essential information on a property and the area it is based in. For example, what attracts people to a certain area, such as nightlife, schools, restaurants, transport links and shopping centres.

Gaming

The gaming sector benefits hugely from the use of location intelligence services. The first advantage is that type-ahead, single-line address verification vastly speeds up the registration journey, improving UX and the mobile journey. This is essential when it comes to onboarding customers as quickly as possible, reducing the risk of losing them. The second benefit is that addresses are validated and correctly formatted regardless of where in the world they are. Ensuring an address is correct for ID verification checks is vital as it means that more customers can place bets and convert. Thirdly, validating email and mobile numbers increases the success of ongoing player contact and marketing campaign success. It is also particularly advantageous when it comes to players using mobile devices, where fat fingers can be the cause of accidental data input errors.

Hospitality

For businesses in hospitality, ensuring details can be entered into online forms quickly and easily is an important factor in improving the booking and signup process. Mobile usage is rapidly increasing, with more and more customers making bookings on the go, at times that are convenient to them. So, implementing a location intelligence data service that creates a smooth mobile experience is more important than ever.

Hospitality customers are looking for more than just a place to stay; they want a great all round customer journey, including receiving communications about their trip, offers and potential places to stay. That means it is crucial for hospitality businesses to capture the correct address, email and phone details

The customer experience for hospitality customers is now more than just deciding where to stay - it’s about the whole customer journey, which also means making sure you can effectively communicate with customers after their booking. Whether this is sending them information about the surrounding area or ensuring that they have the correct reservation details, this is a step that is becoming increasingly important.

CHAPTER THREE

What are the main challenges facing location intelligence?

According to Forrester, half of firms do not understand how to use data in a compliant manner, and 46% lack the technology to analyse and execute with locational data. More than half of firms stated that poor quality location data is one of the biggest inhibitors to their ability to leverage location intelligence. Data quality and technology issues are a particular hindrance to the use of address data.

While 35% of firms currently have a customer base distributed internationally this will increase to 44% over the next three years. Collecting location data, gaining insight, and acting on those data and insights at the scale of the enterprise is becoming more challenging with a globalised customer base.