Businesses are finally waking up to the benefits of Location based services. It is clear that having access to location analytics can provide unprecedented insights into behaviors and activities of your customers. But given the rapid advances that are being made in the LBS space, it can be overwhelming to find the ‘right’ LBS solution and the ‘right’ Lbs Provider.

In this post, we have outlined 10 critical indicators that can help you identify whether a given LBS Provider will be able to add value to your daily operations, or will they only provide a limited capability solution.

1. Scalability

Ask any C-suite executive and he’ll tell you that growth is inextricably linked to scalability. Because when a company grows, it needs a solution that can adapt to its changing needs. As more and more brands expand their LBS offerings, it becomes essential that they are able to harvest all the data from a single dashboard.

Can your LBS provider offer a fully scalable solution with options for small single site businesses all the way up to large multi-site organizations?

2. Smart Insights

The most valuable part of data analytics is enabling smarter business decisions that simply cannot be reached intuitively. Meeting the market’s needs is largely a question of understanding visitors’ behaviors and preferences and effectively segmenting them by personas.

Personas can reveal how a particular group of visitors typically interact with a brand. Based on these insights, visitors can be engaged at different touch points with relevant messages through the entire customer journey.

Can your LBS provider effectively capture raw data (device type, dwell times, behaviors, activities) and convert it into actionable information?

3. Security and Regulatory Compliance

A number of well-known brands have suffered from avoidable digital security breaches. If you collect any kind of data on your customers, safeguarding it automatically becomes your responsibility. This is even more pertinent in a cloud-based world. Not being aware of this may expose you to legal action or damage your brand reputation

Does your LBS provider address data security from the ground up?

4. Support and Reliability

Enterprises need LBS solutions that work as advertised – 24/7. However, experience shows us that this is rarely the case. Any LBS contract should automatically include a SLA, covering not only hardware failures but also integration issues.

Does your LBS provider offer 24X7 access to support staff globally for critical issues,

significantly mitigating against costly downtime?

5. Data Privacy

Whether you intend to collect data on individual consumers, by demographic or in aggregate, it falls on you to keep this safe. If you cannot guarantee your visitors’ privacy, you cannot expect their buy-in. For all anonymous analytics, it is critical that no private information or identification data can be collected or stored.

Does your LBS solution have all the data privacy requirements in place – such as encryption, MAC address hashing capability and anonymizing data?

6. Proven Track Record

Theoretical statements about the stock market aside, going with a company that can proudly talk about previous outcomes is rarely a bad bet. Technical success is necessary, but not sufficient. If an LBS provider can’t show positive outcomes in terms of dollars and cents, they are most likely struggling with a disconnect between technology and its useful application.

That is why it’s important to get some proof of their success; to know if they have actually been able to drive long-term customer engagement in the past for their clients.

Does your LBS provider have a proven track record?

7. Ability to Engage with Visitors at Physical Spaces

Modern day users aren’t satisfied with a service: they demand an experience. Location-based services provide a unique opportunity to interact with the customer: context-aware, low latency, and high interactivity. Once the moment has passed, that marketing opportunity is gone forever.

This makes it critical for an LBS solution to be able to engage visitors through as many channels as possible – SMS, In-app notification, Email, Captive Portal, M-sites, etc.

Does your LBS provider have a multi-channel engagement strategy?

8. Smart Location Hierarchy

50 percent of the time, people are not where the data says they are.

25 percent of the time, places are not where the data says they are.

To make a business impact, LBS solutions should be able to engage visitors at the Right Time and Right Place. If the quality of location data is unreliable, your visitor may miss the ‘moment of truth.’ This is why we stress the importance of location hierarchy. For example, if the location information in the query does not provide enough information to geocode a specific location, a less precise location value may be returned.

Has your LBS provider configured different levels of location hierarchy to optimize results?

9. Smart Guest Acquisition

It is not difficult to expose your brand through advertising. What’s difficult is actually gaining new customers. Guests visiting your premises are captive audiences. Annoying them with complex captive portals can lose them forever.

If you want to acquire and retain your customers, your LBS platform should be able to provide them a seamless onboarding experience, give them an option to log in through their social media accounts. Providing a consistent captive portal experience on all mobile devices will eventually deliver promising returns.

Does your LBS provider offer a streamlined quest acquisition strategy?

10. Enterprise-Wide Integration

Big Data is a business imperative. Visitor behavior data is useful on its own, but it becomes even more powerful when it’s synchronized with other sources of data. Depriving yourself of even one data source can have serious, irrevocable consequences.

It would be a mistake to consider an LBS provider who cannot seamlessly integrate their solution with loyalty programs, CRM, POS softwares and mobile apps.

Can your LBS solution provide seamless enterprise-wide integration?

If you are looking for a robust LBS platform which offers analytics, engagement, and reports, you can check out Proximity MX. It is a scalable platform, capable of providing valuable location insights that can create amazing customer experiences.

The post 10 Things to Look For In Your Location Based Services Provider appeared first on July Systems.