NOTE: The following is a guest post by Parature, from Microsoft Technical Specialist, Geoff Innis. Geoff came to Microsoft with the acquisition of Multimap in 2007, and enjoys helping organizations optimize customer engagement and make smarter business decisions with cloud solutions. He is based in Bellevue, WA.
When interacting with a customer, knowing where they are located can enable a customer service representative to provide them with personalized, real-time, location-specific insight and information. Further, by visualizing larger groupings of customers, interactions, or social media events on a map, customer service and related teams can identify trends by location, and use these location-based trends to optimize customer care strategies and behaviors, as well as proactively address and provide information.
The Bing Maps Blog recently published a developer-oriented post that shows how organizations can spatially enable their approach to customer care by integrating Bing Maps for Enterprise, Microsoft’s enterprise-grade web-based mapping platform, into Parature.
The blog post provides step-by-step guidance on how to:
- Capture information about the customer’s location as they submit trouble tickets through a Parature Customer Portal
- Display map views of individual ticket locations in the Parature Service Desk, to empower CSRs with location context they can use to quickly and accurately resolve customer issues
- Visualize ‘Heat Maps’ of customer issues within the Service Desk, to enable CSRs and supervisors to identify geographic trends in customer issues, and use this location intelligence to make smarter business decisions.
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By incorporating a map view of a customer location or ticket locations directly into the customer service representative’s ticket view, ticket resolution time can be reduced by avoiding agent context switching when:
- Handling issues related to finding nearby locations or service points in proximity to the customer
- Providing information on products or services offered in the customer’s region or specific location
- Pinpointing precisely where customer-reported incidents or other problem-reports are located at first-contact.
Scenarios in which heat map visualizations of tickets can be of benefit include:
- Understanding where, geographically, we may have infrastructural issues that need addressing, based on the concentration of service issue reports
- Understanding which jurisdictions we may need to adapt our constituent outreach programs in
- Understanding which geographies or demographic groups a brand's Parature Knowledgebase content may not be serving effectively, and adapting it.
With the continued increase of customer and constituent engagement through mobile channels and the proliferation of connected devices, along with growing expectations from the customer for real-time, proactive and personalized service, the opportunities to optimize and streamline customer care using location intelligence will only grow over time. This is a great example of where customer service is heading.
You can find the full developer-centric post on the Bing Maps Blog here.
To request additional information on Parature Customer Service Software, click here.