Commentary

3 ways digital maps improve customer experiences

Robert Szyngiel, who leads product management at DMTI Spatial, offers up three ways retailers can use digital maps to improve customer experiences.

Photo by iStock.com

December 11, 2018

By Robert Szyngiel, leader, product management, DMTI Spatial

Digital maps have become an indispensable part of our daily lives. According to a recent Alpha Beta study commissioned by Google, $1.2 trillion of sales worldwide can be tied to digital maps.

But while you may know how much easier maps have made your life, let's take a look at three ways that retailers can use digital maps to improve customer experiences:

1. Digital maps help customers find small businesses
Per the Google study, a staggering 94 percent of searches for local businesses or services involve digital maps. A further 52 percent of study respondents went on record to say that they would not have been able to make a recent purchase without the help of digital maps. With map real estate becoming increasingly crowded, it is imperative that you provide as much valuable information as a consumer needs in order to make a purchase decision. Otherwise, you may lose out on potential sales. Luckily, Google makes it easy for a business to manage the information that accompanies its business listings in a map search.

If you're not already using Google My Business to enhance your store listings, you may be missing out on potential sales. This free tool allows you to display your business's most vital information in a customer-friendly format within search results. Enable your customers to quickly view store locations, hours of operation, storefront pictures, and much more directly in Google Search and Maps. Research suggests the more robust a listing is, the more likely it is that a customer decides to visit a store. According to a study cited in the Google report, access to detailed map listings makes customers 38 percent more likely to visit a local business.

2. Digital maps make purchases more efficient
Time is a precious commodity in today's environment, and consumers look to digital maps to help them put valuable time back into their days. According to the Google-commissioned study, an average consumer saves 11 minutes in their weekly shopping excursions by using the information available on Google Maps. Annually, a user of digital maps saves around 11 hours by way of more efficient purchasing decisions. At the global level, this figure would rack up to 21 billion hours, which in monetary terms would translate to a whopping $280 billion in savings. Customers appreciate companies that are respectful of their time, so if your map entries can give them the information that they need to quickly make a decision, then that could be the difference between a missed sale and a repeat customer.

While digital maps are certainly used to help consumers navigate the world around them, increased reliance on delivery services makes it just as important to give consumers the peace of mind of knowing that your product or service can effectively find its way to them. On-demand services such as Amazon Prime Now and Postmates not only lean heavily on digital maps when delivering orders, but the tracking capabilities of their consumer-facing apps also allow order recipients to plan their days around the arrival of their deliveries.

3. Digital maps help you place stores where customers are likely to visit them
With a strong location intelligence platform, it's easy to conduct market research and demographic analysis to find areas that fit your target parameters. If you have a clear understanding of who your customers are and can easily locate areas where your product or service are underrepresented, you can very easily become a valued provider of a good or service that a community needs (or doesn't know it needs yet). As the Google study indicates, businesses like U.S. retailer Federated Department Stores (the parent company of Macy's and Bloomingdale's) have been able to identify the best locations for their stores using just this method.

Our in-house analysis of the site selection model of Whole Foods (now acquired by Amazon) backs up these findings. The supermarket chain elected to set up shop in neighborhoods with a high median household income to attract affluent customers, as these were likely to be the customers who would visit Whole Foods. Since Amazon was using a similar model to expand its own market presence, acquiring Whole Foods made perfect sense for the e-commerce giant.

Simply put, customers are using digital maps to simplify and, in many cases, drive shopping experiences. Investing the time to solidify your business listings puts time back into your customers' days, and that can have a real-world impact on purchase decisions. Likewise, harnessing location intelligence to expand into new markets can help you avoid costly missteps and provide products or services that new customers currently do not have access to. We all know what the "little blue dot" on a map has done for our own lives; now is the time to think about how you can use it to make your customers' lives easier.