How Brand Leaders Leverage CRM And Location Intelligence To Enrich Their Daily Tasks
Seize the opportunity
Consumers are drawn to brands whose value proposition resonates with their wants and needs — especially brands able to keep up as those preferences inevitably change. To pull that off, consumer-focused businesses such as restaurants, consumer goods companies, retailers and financial services firms need ways to continually monitor how target consumers are evolving. The richer and more granular this insight, the better these businesses can do in developing relevant products and experiences. Rich consumer data enables brands to respond to the three main pillars of consumer values. According to EY, consumer values focus on three main areas: Invisibility, Indispensability and Intimacy.
Indispensability
Intimacy
Invisibility
Source: EY
I want my life to be easier. I care about getting what I need in the most convenient way. I will let AI buy things for me. My loyalty is limited to auto-replenishment and subscriptions.
I want my life improved. I value retailers that optimize things for me. My loyalty is based on their ability to join the dots on my behalf.
I want my life to be fulfilling. I know which retailers I want to spend time with – those that give me the right experience. My loyalty is about shared values and good experiences.
Much of the data needed to gain this deeper level of customer insight rests in the CRM systems most consumer-facing businesses already own. What takes it to the next level is the addition of geographic data that puts that data into context based on location. Combining CRM and location data enables brands to unlock new value from their data, such as:
Creating more personalized customer experiences
Customizing content and campaigns to unique needs and preferences
Tailoring merchandise plans to local tastes, styles and weather patterns
Staffing and managing stores effectively across the portfolio
The powerful combination of CRM and geographic data helps people in nearly every role in the enterprise do their jobs better, whether their customers are engaging with them physically or virtually. The human brain is wired to better understand data when it’s put into geographic context. But many consumer-focused businesses overlook the role of geographic data in empowering better decision-making.
Check out how tasks get easier and more insightful when relevant data is presented geographically for a variety of jobs found in consumer-focused businesses.
Darius
the District Manager
for a big-box retailer
Colleen
the COO
for a pharmacy chain
Marcos
the Chief Merchandising Officer
for a wholesale grocery distributor
Meredith
the Marketing Manager
for a financial services firm
Chris
the CX Director
for a casual dining brand
Select a persona to learn more
How GIS Data Transforms Tasks For...
Chris is responsible for the strategy, planning and execution of the organization’s overall customer experience goals. This means working closely with other department heads to ensure the entire enterprise is delivering a seamless, well-coordinated experience across touch points. The C-Suite has set a goal of driving traffic back to dining-in after a rise in ecommerce orders during the pandemic. Management would also like him to identify potential new customers to expand the business.
see the transformation
flip the switch
Chris knows there are gaps preventing him from getting a complete picture of the brand’s best customers and understanding which experiences drive their loyalty. He’s got the data, but there is too much of it, in too many different places, to create a clear, cohesive view and an engagement plan. He spends much of his day manually pulling that data together.
WITH GIS DATA
With his new directives top of mind, Chris taps into the CRM system and applies filters by annual spend, frequency and sales rank. Next, he overlays this data onto a map of the brand’s store footprint to see the highest concentration of “best customers” by city or neighborhood. With this group now identified by location, Chris explores the store visit frequency and ecommerce order behaviors over the past six months. He identifies several gaps and opportunities to create incentives or benefits for going to the store. Working with his marketing colleagues, Chris helps co-create digital campaigns and tactics including retargeting and display/social advertising to reinforce messaging, touting programs including in-restaurant cooking classes, nutritional courses and wine-and-cheese parties. That messaging targets not just his best customers, but look-alike audiences with similar tastes and behaviors.
Increased incremental sales Enhanced engagement and frequency/spend from the brand’s best customers Increased customer acquisition Creation of repeatable processes to pull precise local data quickly and seamlessly for additional regions and future decision-making Establishment of dashboard to monitor the outcome of location-based programs
WITHOUT GIS
The results
How Else Can A CX Director Use GIS?
Help teams across the enterprise understand who customers are in a highly visual way so they can align on a seamless customer experience Identify opportunities to better integrate physical and virtual experiences according to local behaviors, events and tastes
• • • • •
At work Monday morning, Meredith attends the weekly marketing meeting and emerges with familiar marching orders: Create a campaign to attract first-time home buyers to the firm’s mortgage products. She knows capturing a consumer at this early stage in their financial life can turn a first-time transaction into a broad portfolio of products and a lifetime of brand loyalty. She doesn’t want to simply reinvent an old campaign to achieve her objective. But she also knows there’s a limit to what she can do with the point solutions that give her only a limited view of this audience.
Meredith craves more insight to create a campaign that will really resonate. So she starts digging into data. Before she knows it, it’s 5 p.m. and she hasn’t gotten off square one in generating creative ideas. She’s still seeking better insights on who today’s first-time homebuyers really are.
Meredith leverages CRM data alongside data about locations where there has been an uptick in first-time home purchases. By looking at this segment holistically and at a highly detailed level, she gains new insights into their values and needs, allowing her to begin developing an integrated, multimedia campaign that appeals to this group. She leverages A/B testing in several sample markets to refine the creative. Then, as the campaign fully deploys, Meredith can access precise, real-time metrics about campaign engagement and sales activity by location to fine-tune which messages go to which trade areas based on what resonates with that particular location’s potential first-time buyers.
Increased open rates, campaign engagement and lead generation Elevated customer loyalty to the brand and increased customer lifetime value A single source of truth featuring precise, detailed customer data Proven template to deliver fast, location-aware and highly granular data for future marketing More time for analytics vs. data gathering
How Else Can A Marketing Manager Use GIS?
Re-engage dormant customers, nurture those relationships and activate new purchase activity Use relevant content to build trust and inspire digital engagement and sales
Marcos’ responsibilities include product assortment, brand positioning and sales planning for partner coffee brands and private label. But after a year of demand shocks and shifting consumer needs, merchandise and assortment plans were out of sync with changing customer needs. Yet those needs vary based on both each individual customer and his or her location. Marcos knows the answers lay in their mountains of data, but where?
Marcos looks over a flash sales report and sees the continuation of a familiar trend: coffee sales continue to deviate from plan at many store locations. He scrutinizes pages of detailed data about sales: bean vs. ground, roast type, gourmet vs. budget brands, and so on, across the 1,700 stores he serves. He knows he needs to adjust assortments according to new local tastes, but how?
Marcos combines GIS data that identifies trade areas based on population and sales with the sales reports. Now he can identify trends in category spend and brand preference on a localized, detailed level. He quickly gains new insights into trends, including several rural areas that are now attracting some high-income COVID-inspired transplants with gourmet coffee tastes. Using that data, Marcos and his team identify top-performing brands with high recuring purchase rates, reconsider low-performers and fill in the gaps with a private label offering for each of the segments and regions they serve. The same data helps the team optimize assortments by location. They use these insights to create new models to guide future, similar product decision-making without having to redo the analytics or search for data.
A more relevant, better-performing merchandise plan across the business Greater insight into specific product preferences and performance by location Richer collaboration with retail partners An optimized product assortment Deeper market penetration
How Else Can A Director of Merchandising Use GIS?
Identify high and low performers by location Create store-specific good-better-best assortment Develop direct-to-consumer subscription programs based on customer needs by location
Among her many tasks, Colleen must ensure the organization maintains the right structure to deliver on their growth strategy. Before the pandemic, she and her staff were busy downsizing some locations to a smaller footprint as online orders increased. But with so many consumers relocating in the course of the pandemic and sharply increasing ecommerce activity, she’s now blending that strategy with one that follows their best customers to their new locales, supports new channels and shutters under-performers.
Colleen and her team pour over reams of basic demographic data from the CRM and sales data by store districts to identify new patterns and behaviors. But with so many customer segments and SKUs, it’s hard to get a big picture of overall trends.
Colleen taps into the CRM system and applies filters for annual spend, frequency of visits and sales rank. Seeing the current store footprint in map form helps her to see the highest concentration of “best customers” in each city or neighborhood where the chain operates. Next, she assesses the length of travel for certain customers and notices a higher concentration of rural customers going to specific stores, sometimes driving quite a distance. She also sees an opportunity for some new store locations. In addition, she reviews store-specific purchase behaviors and the proportion of sales that take place in-store versus buy online, pickup in-store, so she knows what kind of footprint to seek out to capitalize on those opportunities. She also develops some insights to share with the CX director to inform store experience strategy, and generates a list of stores ideal for testing fulfillment-based designs and experiences.
A rich, data-driven, customer-driven strategy around the future of their brick-and-mortar and ecommerce businesses A priority list detailing which stores to close and which stores to invest in Deeper insights into new customer behaviors by location Greater operational visibility across the enterprise via location-based dashboards
How Else Can A COO Use GIS?
Identify best customers and find locations featuring look-alike consumers for future stores Lead a shift in strategy by promoting enterprise-wide understanding of who the best customers are and how and where they shop
• • • •
Ensuring a full and effective workforce is among the many responsibilities that Darius must juggle, because his employer is a firm believer that it takes an engaged, well-trained staff to deliver a great customer experience. But recruiting has become harder than ever lately, and the jobs he’s hiring for require new skills such as high-touch selling and in-store fulfillment. Darius is perplexed as to how to shift staffing and recruitment to meet these new demands.
With this morning’s national jobs report fresh in his mind, Darius settles down to tackle the recruitment and staffing problems that store managers keep contacting him about. He takes a look at his workforce reporting and notices openings are particularly heavy in the high-income areas where his senior managers say their best customers shop, but that’s exactly where he’s had trouble hiring. He calls a contact in corporate HR to discuss recruitment strategies, but the two don’t come up with any fresh ideas.
After arriving at his desk, Darius fires up his computer and views a map highlighting stores situated in high-income areas, overlaid with data about staffing levels. Zeroing in on the characteristics of those stores, he notices several of the trade areas also include college campuses. That triggers an idea: he can recruit part-time workers from those schools and provide transportation to get students back and forth between campus and those locations. He reaches out to HR and marketing for help creating social media recruitment campaigns. He also checks in with the field trainer to be sure the new store training program will be ready to onboard those new workers so they can perform the sales and fulfillment tasks those high-income customers expect.
Increased recruitment and staffing levels Visual representation of staffing needs and potential recruitment sources Staffing trained to support CX, sales and fulfillment needs
How Else Can A District Manager Use GIS?
Overlay weather and store location data to see where snowplowing may be needed Fine-tune staff training to the needs and preferences of hyper-local shoppers Identify store-specific traffic patterns to inform staffing and scheduling
• • •
Location Data Lets Customer-Focused Companies See What Others Can’t
For most consumer-facing businesses, access to consumer and other relevant data isn’t the issue. It’s making sense of it quickly and easily enough to make sound decisions. Geographic data adds richness to this information by assigning characteristics to particular locations and enabling people to make sense of the data far more easily. Maps can be considered the world’s first business intelligence tool, because their ability to organize data visually appeals to the way the human brain best perceives information. Compare, say, a list of 157 stores with a long column of numbers representing sales of a particular coffee blend at each one vs. the same information displayed on a heat map by sales volume. The difference is clear. Expand the visual mining concept to the entirety of a company’s data stores, and the result is a powerful, highly accessible tool to help multiple roles better understand what’s happening across the entire business. The addition of rich geographic data, combined with the ability to mine the entire database visually, enables powerful, data-rich decision making enterprise-wide. When customer-facing businesses understand better, they can do better, offering consumers the relevant, highly targeted products, services and messaging that turns them into loyal, engaged customers.
Learn how Esri can help you uncover the geographic insights you need to create uncover previously hidden revenue opportunities among your loyal customers.
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MAPS CHANGE HOW PEOPLE PERCEIVE DATA
“The beauty of dashboarding tools is that they help people visualize something that can be complex. It paints a different operational picture than … just reading the spreadsheets and having the conversations.“
Jason Jackson, Chief Security Officer, Bass Pro Shops
