In a world of bourgeoning e-commerce retail, location data use has grown by leaps and bounds. But what does the future hold in store?
Business Intelligence (BI) is something that no company can do without. And the boom in the availability and application of location data has enriched BI in a manner that is unprecedented. It has facilitated greater operational efficiency in businesses, while also increasing their scope of expansion. The e-commerce market—which is going to be worth around $6 trillion in 2024—in particular makes exhaustive use of Location Intelligence (LI) in its analytics to augment digital customer experience.
Adopting geospatial technology
The interaction on Location & Business Intelligence on Day-3 of Geospatial World Forum started off with a keynote address delivered by Tyler Dahlberg, Senior Data Scientist, Geo, Booking.com, who said, “Travel is one of life’s greatest pleasures. It’s one of the most spatial things that we do and right now we’re trying to return to a world without borders.” He began by describing how location data adds value to his company in marketing, forecasting, developing new products, machine learning, analytics and data science, customer service, operations and partner services, and even office design and layout!
However, Dahlberg cautioned that location data aggregation, as we know it, might well be a thing of the past. The reasons include changing cookie policies by web browsers including Chrome (the most used web browser in the world), new guidelines like the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union, mobile devices’ increased orientation towards privacy, and increasing awareness around data privacy.
Yet, the use of geospatial data has only seen a surge in recent years, and is expected to increase further. So much so, that even non-geospatial concerns are scrambling to make use of the vast swaths of geospatial data. Dahlberg said, “For non-geospatial organizations to get value from LI, there needs to be an LI culture. The number one concern is that non-geospatial people aren’t aware that they’re using geospatial data, or it doesn’t occur to them that they can ask location questions.”
Enhancing customer experience
The keynote address was followed by a session titled ‘Advanced Analytics in e-Commerce Enhancing Digital Customer Experience’, where the lead talk was delivered by Kati Packalen, Head of Customer Experience, PostNord Oy. “We all know that we’re in the heart of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and what Covid has done to e-commerce is that it has kept it growing at an increasing pace,” she said, shedding light on the Customer Experience Management Maturity Model and how it tied in with technology. She finished up with a quote by Steve Jobs: “‘You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward[s] the technology, not the other way around.’”
Charlie Davies, CEO, TravelTime, United Kingdom spoke on the metrics being employed by his company, which interestingly offers a location API that lists places’ reachability on time instead of distance. Fittingly then, Davies claimed that distance was the most overrated metric while saying, “Conversion is the most important metric.”
Although e-commerce retail has seen skyrocketing growth in the past few years, Dara Keogh, CEO, GeoDirectory, EUROGI, said that nearly 80% of sales will continue to take place from brick-and-mortar stores. He also highlighted key issues facing e-commerce: the key point of online friction being ‘checkout’—where roughly 60% of customers abandon the transaction process.
The two-day symposium culminated in a roundtable on the Location and Business Intelligence Maturity Model, where participants weighed in on the different stages of LI and BI maturity and the need for recognizing the complexities of such models while working towards a clearer comprehension of customer expectations.
