A domestic life insurance company wanted to change its sales strategy from offering a single product to the masses to customising these through micro-marketing, identifying key target customers and generating interest in them. The company chose to deploy SatMarketing, a geo-coding tool that helped the insurance firm reach out to its target customers.
SatMarketing, a product developed by Hyderabad-based navigation and global positioning system (GPS) technologies provider, SatNav Technologies, has the ability to geo-code addresses, identify target customers and analyse existing ones. Earlier a part of Satyam Computer Services Limited, SatNav was spun off into an independent entity in 2004.
Geo-coding is the process of converting street addresses, or locations like postal codes, city, district and state codes, ones with definite latitudes and longitudes, which can be entered into a GPS device or a geographical software. SatMarketing, developed on the PHP and Java platforms and copyrighted six months ago, takes customer information like address from an insurance company, compares it with map data, and ensures the particular location is in the point of interest with SatNav. The tool geo-positions a customer's data into digital data. An insurance company can also add other customer demographic information available with them like per-capita income and lifestyle. It can also create an affinity group (high-premium generating individuals) for better premium packages.
The insurance company can also geo-code an agent into the process. The tool puts customer data on the map. It can then bisect it, overlay it with the demographic information, and then package the information at grid-levels, agent-levels and region-levels.
“No organisation can afford to stay complacent by offering a similar product to all sections of society, without considering the identify of their key target customers. The need of the hour is to embrace this change and ride on it, rather than fighting back with outdated tools. The key is customisation, that is, micro-marketing,” says S Selvamuthiah, co-founder and senior vice-president, SatNav.
How accurate is the information the geo-coder provides? Selvamuthiah says even if an address is 50 per cent incorrect, the SatMarketing tool places the agent within a two-three kilometre radius. “Currently, the tool is being offered online and as a desktop application. It is currently used by multiple insurance companies through our partner, Mumbai-based Micro Marketing Services India. We are now looking at extending this to fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), electronic retail chains, banks, telecommunications and automotive,” he says.
SatNav has also developed other tools, SatNavigator and SatTracx, which, besides a multinational FMCG major with a strong foothold in India, is also being used by the Adani Group for its fruit business in Himachal Pradesh. Adani is now trying to extend this tool to its other divisions like mining and power. These tools help firms improve their distribution and routing efficiency, sales force routing and work allocation, leading to higher sales.
“Based on the store data provided by the companies, these tools generate delivery routes for sales teams, depending on their order books…If there is a change in the stores or addresses, there is a user-friendly interface, through which the company can add new information,” says Selvamuthiah.
SatNav has developed a mobile application for GPS-enabled Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows phones, through which the companies can put a scheduler in the app, which already has the map data. The scheduler tracks the sales person ever hour, or according to the time period set earlier.
“Typically, the app gets cell-tower information, or the coordinates, and puts that in the server. It then puts it back into our map. At the end of the day, the company gets a map on the movement of the sales person,” he says.
Selvamuthiah says currently, nine leading insurance companies and two FMCG companies are using its tools. “By the end of the year, at least five of the 10 leading companies in each of these verticals should be using these products,” he says.
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