DEV Community: Nandhini TS

9 Hilarious GIFs That Every Customer Agent Relates To

Nandhini TS — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 09:38:24 +0000

Customer support is one of those roles that gives you an opportunity to directly interact with your customers and help them solve their issues and concerns on a day-to-day basis. It not only gives you an opportunity to enhance customer experience, but also understand how these insights can translate into building a product that your customers truly love.

But, in spite of all the geeky things that you get to do in a customer support career, it has its own share of difficulties. So, here are 9 ridiculously relatable gifs to help you get a good laugh in the middle of a tedious work day.

There are some good customer support tools like DevRev, Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Intercom that can make your work more manageable and fun. However, you can also check some Zendesk alternatives, Freshdesk, and Intercom alternatives!

9 Hilarious GIFs That Every Customer Agent Relates To

Dealing with angry customers who refuse to listen to your explanation and reasons and keep repeating the same thing over and over again.

Trying to explain technical issues to customers who have no idea what you're talking about.

Hearing customers complain about things that are completely out of your control.

Dealing with customers who don't listen to your instructions in spite of a step-by-step hand holding and then blame you when things go wrong.

Trying to maintain your composure when a customer is being unnecessarily rude.

Being asked the same question over and over again, even though you've already answered it multiple times.

When a customer who you thought hated you writes a great review about your service.

When a warm and happy customer gave you a negative feedback.

When you see tickets flooding your inbox first thing in the morning.

In conclusion, being a customer support agent can be a challenging yet rewarding career. It allows you to directly interact with customers and help them solve their issues and concerns. This helps to enhance their overall experience with a product or service, while also providing valuable insights that can be used to improve the product. However, it's important to acknowledge the difficulties that come with the role, including dealing with angry or difficult customers, trying to explain technical issues, and receiving negative feedback.

How To Inject A Dash Of Fun In Your Bland Emails: 5 Steal-Worthy Strategies

Nandhini TS — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 03:53:45 +0000

It’s early in the morning and you pick up your favorite book, say Harry Potter and make your hibiscus tea.

You get all cozy on the couch and start sipping on your tea and reading the book.

The book is so engaging that you are only physically present in the living room of your couch but your mind is wandering at the castles of Hogwarts.

If you’ve read the book, I’m sure you understand what you mean.

JK Rowling has a way with words. She gets very descriptive and makes the reader visualize every minuscule detail without any effort.

You needn’t be a fan of the Harry Potter series to understand this.

Take any book for that matter - how does the author make you feel?

They do the magic of making you traverse where they set the story with you physically staying intact where you are.

If these books tell stories with a bland narration of what they intend to say, how’d you like it?

Eww! Right?

You’d finish your hibiscus tea and slam the cover of the book hard.

Email marketing is no different from a fictional book.

It needs all the ingredients for a sumptuous email.

Why Does Your Email Need A Dash Of Fun?

To tell memorable stories
To build an amazing brand
To make audiences stick around
To engage and entertain

5 Steal-Worthy Strategies To Make Your Emails Engaging

1. Use Power Words In Your Emails

Emotions are powerful.

Every email that you send has a message and an emotion attached to that message.

Be it an email with links to your recent blog post or a feature update or a limited deal - every email has a message with emotion as a key variable.

Humans connect when you lure them in with emotions and words play a major role in that!

Instead of saying “There are offers on all products till the end of October”

This is a more powerful subject line: “Limited deal on all products. Offers expire in 30 days!

Words like “limited” and “expire” instigate a sense of urgency and urges the recipient to take action. It also creates a feeling of losing out if they don’t act on it immediately.

Depending on the purpose of your email, you may want to sprinkle these power words to not only add a dash of fun to your emails but also make them goal-oriented.

2. Stock Images and Videos

The aesthetics of your email heavily depends on the media assets that you use.

The stock images and videos complement the aligned paragraphs, white spaces, the contrasting colors of the CTA buttons and make your email look ravishing!

Using stock images and embedding videos in your emails are important because:

It gives the readers a visual cue
Communicates the objective of the email within seconds
Keeps your audience engaged and hooked
Gives the reader more details and understanding of your offerings
Makes your email more honest and resourceful

Stock images and videos are particularly effective when you market SaaS products or if you own an eCommerce store.

Let’s for example say that you see gadgets online.

When you leverage emails for your marketing efforts, just tables with all the specifications won’t make the cut!

You have to leverage images and videos to make your pitch more genuine and compelling.

There are a lot of email marketing tools like BayEngage that have an in-built library of stock images whereas tools like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign do not. In which case you may want to look for Mailchimp alternatives and ActiveCampaign alternatives.

Pick a tool that facilitates this as it is key for your email engagement.

3. Fun, Bright, and Relevant Emojis

Emojis are great ingredients to spice up your bland emails.

They are particularly helpful in increasing your open rates because:

Emojis tell a story
Make the objective of your email apparent
They break the inbox clutter
They weave in a story
They entertain your audience

Adding emojis helps you add more weightage to your text-only subject line and ensure a high click-through rate.

Here’s a quick comparison of subject lines with and without emojis.

Examples:

1. Tick tock...the sale ends at IST 2 pm

⏰ Tick tock...the sale ends at IST 2 pm

2. Just swish and flick. Magical offers are live now.

🧙 Just swish and flick. Magical offers are live now.

3. Save $100 on your next purchase. Grab your coupon now!

Save $100 on your next purchase. Grab your coupon now! 🤑

Remember to not overdo them and keep them relevant to the purpose of your email.

4. Get Hip With Gifs

Gifs are a great way to get your point across to your audience with minimal effort.

The features of your products and the tips on how to navigate through them are understandable and more compelling with gifs rather than using words to explain them.

Gifs are a powerful visual medium that can get the point across within seconds.

Gifs also have an element of entertainment attached to them.

Think about this for a moment.

Instead of building a lot of sentences that try to convey to the reader how an annoying boss can ruin the workday, a meme of Michael Scott.

This sums things up better than words can! Doesn’t it?

But, here’s what you need to know:

Don’t explain your gifs - It defeats the purpose
Keep it relatable and simple
Use words wherever necessary and avoid gifs
Don’t overdo it
Don’t be disrespectful
Pick popular fictional characters that everyone knows and relates to
Know the geography that you target - don’t use Michael Scott’s gif to an audience who belong to India

5. Be Insanely Relatable With Memes

Memes are the trend, the buzz, and what people relate the most to.

The Internet is ruled by memes and everyone knows this. Memes are not just a content type that belongs to social media. They’re used by marketers across all the channels and content formats.

Be it blogs, community forums, slides, and of course emails memes are the way to land straight to your audiences’ hearts.

Memes are more powerful than a thick paragraph of words.

Think about it - What’s more engaging, entertaining, and instantly digestible?

This sentence or the meme that follows?

“Clean up your email lists for the holidays and keep your database fresh and updated”.

Best Practices For Using Memes In Your Emails

Don’t overdo it
Make sure that you understand your audience
Don’t test the intelligence of your audience with a complicated meme
Keep it light, relatable, and simple. Don’t overcomplicate it
Don’t offend anyone
Keep in mind the native audience

Wrapping Up

Email marketing need not be a serious and monotonous task!

When spruced up, it can be entertaining, fun, and engaging!

I hope these tips come in handy the next time you plan your email campaign.

If you want to add anything else, share your ideas in the comments and I’d love to chat!

The Power Of Email Segmentation: What Can A Lasagna Teach You?

Nandhini TS — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 07:36:07 +0000

It was half past one and I was starving.

My tastebuds were craving for lasagna.

I quickly made an online order and in exactly 18 minutes my lasagna was delivered.

As I was about to devour this gorgeous food, the layers caught my attention.

I thought about it - the layering was done with such taste, craft, method, and grace.

Zippy!

The marketer in me could not stop thinking about how closely this is related to segmentation in email marketing.

Think about it.

A layer of thin pasta sauce on the bread, cooked lasagna noodles stacked upon another layer of bread, cheese mixture, and the final layer loaded with corn and veggies.

The chef has baked the lasagna with such precision and care to make sure that their customer would relish the dish.

How’d the experience be if the layering was lousy?

Needless to say, BAD.

Segmentation in email marketing, like a sumptuous lasagna is carefully done to separate audiences based on common characteristics.

Customers who belong to a certain geography, demography, personality, behavioral patterns are categorized together into individual groups called ‘segments’.

What is Email Segmentation?

Email segmentation is the process of grouping the contacts for your email marketing based on certain common characteristics. Segmentation helps in making the emails more personal, relevant, and ROI-driven.

Importance of Email Segmentation

Just like how layering justifies the very essence of lasagna, segmentation also has a lot of significance when it comes to email marketing.

Let’s have a look at it.

Segmenting your emails results in better relevance in your subject lines and the email content. This not only results in boosting your open rates, but also your click-through rates.
When your recipients feel a connection through your emails, they start trusting in your content. You can significantly reduce your spam score as well as unsubscribe rates.
When your emails are not a plain untargeted blast, the engagement rate would also slowly begin to spike thus improving your email deliverability.
Continuous efforts in segmenting your audience and catering to their exact needs would help you eventually build a long and loyal relationship.

Segmentation, in a way, helps you improve every email marketing metric.

How Does Personalization Differ From Segmentation?

The terms “Segmentation” and “Personalization” may seem like synonyms. But, there’s a fine difference between the two.

Before we look at the difference tactically, let’s get back to our lasagna analogy (it’s hopefully fun).

Layering a lasagna with sauce, noodles, cheese, vegetables, and bread between all these layers is segmentation.

Catering to a specific need or want of a customer and going the extra mile is personalization - say, adding olives or extra cheese on the lasagna just because your customer likes it that way.

Similarly, the segmentation exercise gives you all the data that you want.

Do you want a segment of the audience who are women who recently purchased a handbag and live in Massachusetts?

You got it.

That’s segmentation. While on the other hand, when you use this data to create emails that resonate with the audience, that’s personalization.

You can templatize these emails based on the segmentation you have created. But, if you want to go beyond and do hyper-personalization, that’s when you tweak your emails based on additional research.

So, personalization is the by-product of segmentation.

Types of Email Segmentation

Let’s now deep dive into different bases on which audiences can be segmented.

1. Demographic Segmentation

Demographic data is the most basic yet significant form of segmentation that gives information about the customers’ age, gender, income, employment, marital status, education, and more.

This information will help in channelizing emails that cater to a set of audience.

For instance, let’s say you sell Denim t-shirts online.

Now, if let’s assume you segment the audience based on a data point, say, age.

Then, let’s say you have 2 sub-segments with age ranging from 20 to 30 and 60 to 70.

In this case, you’d be more aggressive with your email campaigns for the data range 20 to 30 rather than 60-70.

Demographic data comes in handy in determining the content, concept, frequency, and the overall strategy of your email campaigns.

2. Transactional Segmentation

Transactional based segmentation is one of the most lucrative segmentations.

Based on the customers’ total time spent on the website, spend, frequency of purchases, and other such transactions, audience segments can be created.

This segment will be particularly handy because it gives you insights into who’s likely to spend and who's not.

Depending on their purchase patterns and browsing time on your website, you can personalize your email campaigns and make the best out of these high and low-intent buyers.

3. Behavioral Segmentation

As the name suggests, behavioral segmentation is based on the user behavior with the website.

This can be anything from their subscription status, orders placed, cart abandoned, purchase history, email metrics, and more.

This will help you understand the actions of the user and send emails accordingly.

For instance, you can send an email to a user who just placed an order with cross sell and upsell opportunities. Whereas, an abandoned cart trigger email could persuade the customer to complete a purchase by luring them with an offer or discount.

4. Geographic Segmentation

Segmentation based on geographic data is very useful for an email marketer because it helps in catering to geo-specific needs of the recipient.
There are multiple attributes when it comes to geographic segmentation - culture, climate, trends, and events.

Think about this - An email hitting an inbox of a recipient that says “Diwali is right around the corner, grab the latest launches”. to an audience who live in the United Stats

Geographic segmentation eliminates this mismatch and ensures that your emails make a lot more sense.

5. Psychographic Segmentation

Psychographic segmentation is more advanced than demographic segmentation or any other segmentation for that matter.

It helps you segment customers based on values, their interests, tastes and preferences, and more which gives you a huge scope in making emails hyper personalized and conversion-driven.

Wrapping Up

I hope this post urges you to phase out email marketing that is a generic blast to your audiences and instead adapt to the concept of segmentation.

This will help you make your emails more relevant, personalized, and conversion-driven.

There are some good tools like BayEngage, Mailchimp, Hubspot, and more that offer segmentation possibilities.

But, popular tools like Mailchimp and Hubspot do not cater specifically to the eCommerce industry and have limited possibilities when it comes to segmentation.

I’d recommend checking out some good tools and alternatives!

You go get your list segmented while I grab another bite of my lasagna!

The Perfect Anatomy of An Email Template for 4th of July

Nandhini TS — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 12:39:34 +0000

Parades. Backyard Barbecues. Fireworks.

Breezy time along with family and friends.

The 4th of July brings about a lot of these vibes.

American citizens enjoy the day of freedom by not just spending time with their folks, but also splurging a bit on gifts - 4th of July goodies, apparel, food, merchandise, and more.

Look at the graph below to understand the spending patterns all through the years.

Source: NRF's Annual 2021 Independence Spending Survey, conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics

Now, this something that an eCommerce store can significantly capitalize on. More so because of the current pandemic situation that has made eCommerce shopping more critical and convenient.

If your store has a sale or offer owing to the 4th of July celebration, then, you have to amp up your efforts in promoting the sale to drive better conversions.

Emails are a lucrative channel for eCommerce sales, particularly around the holidays.

Today, we’d be looking at creating a 4th of July email campaign - the complete anatomy of how to design a template that can help you skyrocket conversions.

Let’s begin.

The Anatomy of 4th of July email template

A good email template typically has six key components.

Before we go over each of these, let’s have a quick glance at a 4thof July email template and its key components.

Now that you have a fair idea, let’s dive right in!

1.Logo

Placing your logos on the top of your email design creates an instant familiarity with your brand. The recipients can get a quick understanding of who’s it from and what they can expect.
But, keeping the significance of it aside there are also other things that you need to consider on the design front.

Depending on what comes below your logo, you can determine where you want it to be placed - whether on the left side or in the middle. Following the hierarch of your template design would be ideal for the logo placement.

In our anatomy graphic, the template is center aligned, so placing the logo in the center would make it visually more compelling.

Another best practice for your logo design on your template would be to have alt tags, a pre-loader image that can still give the readers a good email viewing experience in case your email takes time to load.

Also, be mindful of the logo size optimization for mobile view - because it is no brainer that most of your recipients read emails on their mobile devices.

2.Navigation bar

Including a navigation bar in your email is the easiest way to help your readers explore other products and categories they could potentially be interested in.

There is no set rule as to where you want your navigation menu to be or how it should be designed. You can have them even in the middle of the email and redesign it in a way that best suits the rest of your email theme.

However, here are some best practices:

Don’t overwhelm and confuse the readers with too many menus
Remember to optimize the visuals for mobile and other devices
Keep the categories relevant to your customers (think recipient gender, geography, interests, and other demographic data)
Keep the names of the menus consistent (your website)

3.Email Banner/Header

This is the most crucial part of your email design because this is what your recipient is exposed to as soon as they open your email. If the header design fails to impress them, there’s a good chance of them not scrolling further at all.

So, it is very important to be tasteful with your banner design and the text that you decide to show here.

Here are some things to keep in mind for the header text:

Keep it short and simple
Make things clear and don’t fail to convey the core message
Let the recipient know what to expect
Keep the colors strategic (think background color, email theme)
Choose a themed font

Next comes the banner design which is another important piece.

This can either be an illustration, stock image, a gif, or an abstract - no matter what, it should blend well with the July 4 theme, the products that you sell, and your audience.

Make sure that you add alt tags for images and your images are copyright-free. You can consider websites like Freepik, Shutterstock, GIPHY, and more for some free resources.

4.Products on Sale

Letting your customers know about the products on sale is the objective of your email campaign.

Also, this would essentially be the body of your email.

So, be mindful of the products that you decide to feature in your email and explain what the offer exactly is - a quantity gift, a price slash, a coupon, etc.

Keep the section minimal with the product image, title, price, and a CTA.

Don’t try to include too many products in your email as it can clutter the design and confuse the recipients.

Allowing them to explore more products would suffice - if the products you featured entices them, then you are sorted!

5.Contact information

Including contact information in your email footer has its perks.

Making it easier for the customer to contact you would be a great way to boost customer satisfaction and their experience with your brand.

Depending on what email you are sending, in our case July 4; the contact information may vary.

For July 4th Sale, you can include a contact number or a support email the customer can reach out to.

6.Unsubscribe link

Including an unsubscribe link is important both by law and by picking the path of what’s good for your business.

You must include an unsubscribe link to help your users have the option of opting out of your emails if they don’t want to receive communications from you.

It is also imperative that you include them so that you can weed out those who’d not be benefitting from your emails: where there’s no opportunity to convert.

Wrapping Up

We’re only a week away from the 4th of July!

It would be the perfect time to plan your email campaigns. Now, this anatomy is a checkpoint that’d help you whether you are designing a template from scratch or editing a template.

Here’s a quick recap.

On that note, wishing y’all a Happy 4th of July and a profitable season 😀💥

The crossroads of Marketing and HR: Why this partnership will work for your organization?

Nandhini TS — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 16:21:50 +0000

What’s your recruitment goal?

Before we hop onto the article, I’d like you to grab a pen and paper or your digital note-taking app and write this down.

Your answer can be a couple of points (but keep it broad and powerful).

The HR journey works in a circular loop starting from recruitment, onboarding, training, performance management, engagement, promotion, farewell, and recruitment again. Without clear goals, it is hard to consistently hire and retain the best talents.

HR is not a one-person job. It is a cross-functional role that needs working along with the entire length and breadth of the organization. At every stage of recruitment, training, and performance management, HR and marketing cannot stay exclusive of one another.

The common question is who owns employer branding?

The Netflix Anecdote

A viral document that calls out the work culture of Netflix has more than 5 million views on the Internet.

This document is path-breaking and is the pioneer of the “take a vacation when you need” culture that we see in startups today. The long story short version of an HBR interview with Netflix’s best engineers is this:

Hire only “A” players and not just adequate talent. The leaders preferred working by themselves rather than fixing the subordinates’ mistakes all the time
A clear track record, likability, and work ethic would any day trump inadequacy of skills

In addition to creating a casual and cool work culture, Netflix is particularly concerned about the quality of people they hire and retain.

The Convergence Theory of HR and Marketing: The former meets the latter

As already mentioned, HR is a cross-functional role.

But, do you know where this collaboration raises to a new high?

With Marketing.

Not just Netflix, but a lot of companies sincerely embrace the concept of ensuring that Marketers and HR folks are in tandem to elevate employer branding to a whole new level.

A key component of attracting A-players to your company is through strong employer branding.

Potential job seekers who might be an ideal fit for your organization may be interested in a couple of other opportunities as well.

What sets you apart from the others is how well you convey to the potential candidates about your work culture, the perks of being associated with your organization, and making it irresistible for them to join your organization.

The ultimate goal of HR is to hire the best talent for the company and for marketers is to serve the customers better. In a lot of ways, Marketing has a role to play at every touchpoint of a potential candidate’s journey as well ( will be discussed further in the following sections).

What’s at the Cynosure? The latter meets the former

Weave branding into HR communications
Keep your voice consistent across platforms
Create content assets that promote work culture
Leverage marketing channels for promotion
Build employee advocacy by adhering to norms

5 Actionable tips to elevate employer branding and to improve the recruitment process

Assess the different touchpoints and take action

Think of a typical candidate’s research journey into identifying and evaluating your company. The search engines and the social media handles are the prime sources where a candidate can gauge insights and make a decision.

More often than not, corporate social media handles create content that screams “buy my product”. Companies are taking the social out of social media and bombarding their feed with unilateral content. For a candidate who lands on your Instagram feed, the excitement to join your company happens only if you blend in real people in it.

Instead of reserving your social media handles for product promotions, make it more human with a sneak-peek into your workspace, a meeting room discussion, the CEO interacting with employees, and a lot more.

You can also own a separate social media handle for “culture” like how many companies are doing today.

How can you improve employer branding?

Work with marketing on creating content as they own the social presence of a brand
Exchange ideas with marketing and roll-out strategies in the best interest of the brand
Promote employer branding with images and videos created 4. using tools like Canva and a video maker like Animaker
Maintain brand voice while responding to job opportunity queries through social media

Create a win-win by encouraging employee advocacy

Employee advocacy is a marketing strategy where the employees of the company help in amplifying the reach of marketing efforts in social or through other channels.

According to a study by Cisco, employee posts can generate 8X more engagement than when that same content is shared through a brand handle.

Dell is one of the pioneers of implementing the employee advocacy strategy into their marketing plan. Another company that has excelled in this is Starbucks. They call their employees “partners”. Their guidelines encourage them to be authentic, cautious, and passionate.

Employee advocacy is not just confined to being an endorser of the product or services. But, also positively impacting the culture through genuinely spreading the word about the satisfaction of working for a company. Employee advocacy should be leveraged by HR to amplify the employer branding, to spread the word about company culture, and help potential candidates know what it is like to work for your company.

How to implement employee advocacy?

Understand the employee advocacy policies
Measure how the strategy is impacting your recruitment goals
Create content by consulting marketing so that it works well across different social media channels

Assess and review your goals

In plain terms, Marketing wants to serve customers and HR wants employees who can get them to do that.

A company’s goals are closely aligned with the employees as they can be achieved through them. HR and marketing can work in a cadence so that they do not let go of the best talent. As a matter of fact, according to Smashfly, 48% of companies with an email capture never send emails to the people who signed up.

Passive employees are those who are interested in your company but did not have an opportunity for a role they’re looking for at the moment or vice-versa. Instead of scratching your heads to find the right candidate for a role, HR folks must aim for the low-hanging fruit with a newsletter. This can typically cover company events, updates, job openings, milestones, employee stories, and more.

Why do you need to work with Marketing?

Utilize their expertise in the stream of content creation and designing
Target the right people with data at the disposal of the marketing team
Measure the metrics of the newsletter performance and tweak strategies

Leverage marketing channels to your advantage

Just like how in marketing a typical buyer’s journey is fragmented across different channels and touchpoints, so is the case with an employee too.

A potential job seeker will check your corporate website, social media handles, review sites like Glassdoor, and a lot more. Marketers leverage organic and paid strategies to reach the target. Similarly, HR can also work towards optimizing their presence and distribute it across different channels.

How can you utilize marketing channels to improve the recruitment process?

Making careers page more casual and realistic with images of real people and the workstations
A paid component can also be a part of HR strategies and they can collaborate with marketing to understand the different channels
Creation of culture videos to be promoted on social channels, embedded on websites, and added in email signatures. 4. Marketing can help with conceptualizing and scripting
Elevating the portal UIs with a good design that aligns with the brand

Partner with influencers to amplify the reach

Influencer outreach is the best way to reach a huge audience and quickly hack growth. This has always been working for marketers. But, how does this help in recruitment? The answer is simple. Influencers who create content in your niche have a huge follower base who believe in their thoughts and ideologies.

Working with them in getting a word out about the culture of your company or any openings would help you identify the right candidate. Influencers make content interesting and authentic by drawing out insights from their personal experiences. If you are hiring at a scale or looking to elevate employer branding, this is a good strategy to experiment with.

How can marketing help you with influencer outreach?

Brainstorm and adopt the right approach
Promote the content effectively across channels
Measure the success of the campaign

Over to you

Do you have the goals I asked you to jot down beside you?

Nice.

If your goals do not have to work along with the marketing team in it, it’s time you add them. Not just during recruitment, but also at the time of onboarding and training marketing can help HR streamline the process of content creation and presentations. While this is only true for spearheading the process on a tactical level, HR folks need not completely depend on marketing end-to-end.

If you have another area where these two teams could possibly collide, do let us know in the comments.

Five industries that can make the most out of Location Intelligence

Nandhini TS — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 13:58:20 +0000

We’re all familiar with the drill of booking a cab, isn’t it?

We set a destination, choose a cab that suits our comfort and affordability, book, and hop on to get started on the ride.

For this mechanism to function efficiently, a lot of data crunching and algorithm feed runs in the background - based on location intelligence.

The utility of location intelligence is not exclusive just to the ride-hailing services, the depth and breadth of the concept can be applied to several other industries and use cases too.

The concept of location intelligence has given a new dimension to every business. It is difficult to find a company that is not using location intelligence to serve its customers better. Right from a simple location-based re-targeting ad to resolving complex problems, applications of location intelligence has become apparent in every sector.

Today, we’ll be exploring different industries that utilize location intelligence to serve customers better, simplify the operations, and achieve efficiency.

Let’s get started.

How location intelligence is reshaping these different industries

1. The role of location intelligence in the insurance industry

Location intelligence can help insurance companies in multiple ways.
Let’s see a few ways in which underwriters and policyholders are benefitted.

Determine insurance coverage based on geographic zones. Some areas are prone to more natural calamities than others. Based on forecasts and weather analytics, insurance companies can determine the impact of a plausible calamity within a defined locality. This enables the insurer to help the policyholder minimize damage and save on indemnification. Location intelligence helps insurers determine the loss and mitigate risks.

Identify the right audience with location analytics. Every insurance company dreams of contacting the potential prospect to sign off a policy. To be able to pinpoint the right prospect, the company needs to understand the propensity to buy various insurance policies, an individual’s net worth, neighborhood information, demographic details, spending patterns, and more. Location intelligence helps in aggregating this information from public records and other sources and analyze this information to provide intelligence on potential prospects.

Take safety measures while visiting the field. Claim adjusters can be well-informed with location analytics as the data can provide them safety analysis while visiting the field. The embed of interactive disaster maps and customer location maps can help in assessing the safety of paths and roads while visiting.

2. How location intelligence is transforming retail

Retail GIS is catching up real quick. Combining location intelligence with customer data and operational data helps in deriving tremendous insights. Location analytics in retail helps to elevate the customer experience.

Omnichannel selling is catching up real quick. Omnichannel selling essentially means a seamless shopping experience across various touchpoints.

Hubspot defines omnichannel as – An omnichannel experience is a multi-channel approach to marketing, selling, and serving customers in a way that creates an integrated and cohesive customer experience no matter how or where a customer reaches out.

For instance, a customer begins their shopping journey on their laptop and completes it on their tablet or smartphone - this is an instance of omnichannel. Also, when they decide to make an order on their gadget and pick up the order in a brick and mortar store, that’s omnichannel selling too. Delivering consistent shopping experience across various touchpoints requires location data about the supply chain, real-time location data of the customer, and more to deliver a successful omnichannel experience.

In order to plan a successful marketing outreach, a retailer and their marketing teams require location intelligence.

Technologies like beacons and artificial intelligence along with location intelligence helps marketers in personalizing the customer experience. Knowing where the customer lives, the proximity to their workplace, where they shop, and more (all with customer’s consent to use location data) will help in placing contextual ads that prompt offers, discounts, and tailored suggestions. This is common in stores at the malls that leverage geofencing or polygon data to attract customers that incline towards checking out a competitor’s store.

3. Fitness and Healthcare - Scaling up to serve better

As for the fitness industry, the application of location intelligence to their business strategies can be manifold.

Fitness centers can leverage location intelligence for site planning analysis that can help them identify the most lucrative locations based on the POI data and polygon information that charts out details on competitors in and around the locality, the demography that covers age, gender, propensity to earn, and more. Depending on this information, setting up centers would become more strategic and profitable.

In addition to this, fitness centers can also leverage location intelligence to personalize their marketing messages depending on the target persona and the footfall traffic. The closer they are to the fitness center, the message can be sent to them in order to gauge interest.

On a complex level, the fitness industry is also increasingly adopting location intelligence for their app development to offer features as distance covered and sync location data with other information like the age and gender of the user to prompt contextual communication.

GIS in Healthcare. Healthcare centers can also leverage location intelligence for site planning, supply chain management of pharmaceuticals to monitor distribution management. Also, strategic planning of events, welfare programs, and outreach initiatives can be made possible through location data analytics that gives insights into the geography, the associated healthcare facilities, what diseases they are prone to, and more.

4. How location intelligence powers transportation and logistics

Location intelligence and GIS in transportation helps in inventory management by rerouting drivers to less congested areas and to favorable weather conditions. Location data combined with the technical know-how of fleet managers and virtual assistants help in reducing the time to delivery to the end-customer as well as the loading and unloading time taken at the warehouses.

Location intelligence helps to uncover traffic patterns and perform accident analysis. The GIS system provides spatial statistics, and when this is combined with other factors helps to perform accident analysis. A pinpoint of the locations at which there are frequent accidents and analyzing the GIS systems hold potential insights to bring out safety measures.

Location intelligence also helps in the optimal consumption of fuel and minimizing fleet operating costs. By leveraging real-time monitoring and predictive analytics of fuel consumption on certain routes and during idle time helps in calculating accurate fuel consumption.

5. Enabling better customer experience for the hospitality industry

Geolocation has made customer experience far beyond just coupons and offers. Combining predictive analytics with location data can help serve customers better. Getting the dinner ready-to-serve as the guests walk into the lobby, assigning room maintenance staff as soon as the guest leaves the room becomes a reality with location intelligence.

When geolocation is combined with predictive analytics, for instance, let’s say the customer data is available pertaining to their travel patterns, food choices, travel partners, food preferences, etc. for the past few years that is collated from various sources like social media, feedback forms, reviews and ratings, and more can be combined with the location of the customer in real-time and nearby services to prompt relevant communication and recommendations.

Combining geolocation and predictive analytics can help in improving customer experience. For instance, predictive analytics of the customer data pertaining to food preferences, travel partners, travel patterns, etc. can be leveraged to contextualize communication. This data can be collated from sources like social media, feedback forms, reviews and ratings, and more. The predictive analytics and location data, combined, can help in making relevant recommendations to the guests.

Monitoring footfall traffic of the guests within the hotel premises can also help hoteliers gauge an understanding of their likes and preferences - how often they visit the coffee shops, restaurants, spa, and other places. Based on further analysis, services can be tailored to the customers during their stay or when they visit next time.

So, location intelligence is for every business?

To be able to improve customer experience, make well-calculated strategic business decisions, and simplify operations location intelligence can be leveraged.

With the growing advancements in location intelligence like embedded connectivity, location maps, monitoring weather fluctuations, and a lot more, companies can deliver hyper-personalized experiences.

There are several location intelligence solutions in the market like X-tract.io that cater to the needs of different industries. If you need help in kick-starting your journey with location intelligence, you may want to explore such solutions that cover:

GPS and footfall tracking
Wide range of POI data
Demographic data
Real-estate data
Polygon data
LI-based analytics and insights
Data visualization and hypotheses

We hope you enjoyed this post and if there is any industry that you wish to add to the list, drop a comment and share it with the community!