Availability of low cost of entry, location-centric information is changing usage and driving better value from data assets, says Pitney Bowes Business Insight

Windsor, Berks UK – 26 May 2010 – The rise of Location Aware CRM will enable organisations to unlock the value of their data assets, according to Pitney Bowes Business Insight, the leading global provider of location intelligence, data management, and customer communication management solutions. Enterprises now have access to ever increasing volumes of business data. However, to gain maximum value from this data, and be able to do more with less under tighter budget constraints, they must unlock their data assets and make better use of the location element in order to drive deeper business insights that improve competitiveness and business performance.

Once considered as having overhyped expectations, CRM technologies have now become a critical element of competitive enterprise strategies. The ‘extended CRM application ecosystem’ has at its core five fundamental purposes: customer targeting, customer acquisition, customer retention, customer understanding, and customer collaboration. Today, CRM applications are witnessing re-envigoured growth, underpinned by multi-dimensional data, extended via web services, and driven by the fundamental business need to acquire, serve and grow customers.

“Previously, location-centric information was collected and analysed by hand, making it expensive, time consuming and labour intensive with the need for specialist mathematicians and skill sets to analyse the results,” said Scott Robinson, Director, Global Data Products Pitney Bowes Business Insight. “However, the availability of low cost of entry, easy to access, high-quality data for business users has changed both attitudes and usage to location-centric information, and is now driving acceptance in mainstream decision making.”

According to industry analysts, Ovum, more than 80 per cent of enterprise databases, 70 per cent of all documents and 25 per cent of all web content have geospatial co-ordinates that can be visualised on a map as points, lines or areas. However, whilst 80 percent of all data has a location component, it is not being capitalised by organisations and IT systems today.

Pitney Bowes Business Insight is addressing this critical requirement through its Location Aware CRM solutions, comprising Location Intelligence, Data Management and Customer Communications Management, which enable customers to harness the power of the ‘where’ dimension in their operational, business, and strategic decisions. Location Aware CRM solutions add value across each area of the extended CRM application ecosystem, and enable organisations to analyse vast amounts of multi-dimensional data for greater business insight and better decision making. PBBI believes that Location Aware CRM is set to break into mainstream business computing over the next two to five years.