Why Maps Integration Within Dynamics 365 & Power Apps is Essential for your Business

Did you know that according to Forbes, 80% of all business data contains a location component? 80%! This makes location among the most sought after information about a customer in today’s time. Using location as a central focus can help your business to extract insights and allow you to make data-driven decisions. Here’s the good news – not every business has realized this yet, there are many businesses that still lack this type of locational intelligence and its associated value.

Now, what if you were able to tap into this 80% of geospatial data and use Locational Intelligence to expand your business intelligence by merging it with the already powerful abilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM solutions (otherwise known as CE) and Power Apps?

Intrigued?

Let us tell you what would happen – your business insights would grow richer, your ability to extract answers and visualize them on a map would unlock, and your business processes would automate and optimize. This is exactly what Maplytics, a 5 star rated and Preferred App on Microsoft AppSource does!

Maplytics is an intelligent tool built for intelligent businesses. It is a geo-analytical tool that sources its data from your Dynamics 365 CRM / Power Apps and maps it using its Bing’s Map integration. Since 8 out of 10 marketers use a locational component in their marketing efforts, marketers try to gain locational data from their customers and around 70% of customers share their locational information for loyalty points or coupons. There is huge potential that can be tapped into with Maplytics!

Maplytics enhances the Dynamics 365 user’s abilities by allowing them to use locational data for different activities like plotting and analyzing their CRM data on a map, categorizing the records, extracting locational insights, pinpointing customers and competitors, and creating information driven strategies.

Moreover, you can perform actions like appointment planning, route optimization, radius search, etc. to execute and align your efforts with strategies to get targeted outputs! With all of that ready to unpack, let’s walk you through some of these features that are highly celebrated amongst the Dynamics community:

Appointment Planning

Appointment planning can be easily taken care of by using Maplytics Auto Scheduling. It helps users to create an optimized schedule to be followed in the field over a span of days by the concerned field professionals. The user can perform Auto scheduling on the required set of records (eg. clients) to create Appointments with the considerations of existing appointments, the preferred days of working, different meeting durations, availability of the selected users etc. This feature helps users create appointments based on the shortest time in order to provide an effective plan for field reps. Users can create schedules for single or multiple users at once.

So, in summation, Automated Schedules rechannel the time and effort spent by managers in creating and perfecting their schedules towards more important business and customer-oriented tasks requiring managerial inputs. Meanwhile, the intelligent schedules enhance the productivity for in-field reps and streamline their everyday work.

Radius Search

Radius search is one of the most popular and powerful features of Maplytics. It helps users to find nearby customers, leads, and prospects on the basis of distance or time. Users can also perform multiple proximity searches. They can choose to set their current location to be the central point of search and instantly be served with a list of clients near them. When they hover or click over a record they can see details of the record like straight line distance, shortest travel time, sales, and other information about the record.

Radius search helps give your field reps an instant actionable plan for their next activity while in the field. This is a game-changer when you consider the constantly changing nature of in-field sales, service, and marketing activities where customers are involved. Moreover, the quick and insightful information about each customer allows field reps to make data-driven decisions in real-time.

Route Optimization

What are the most common issues a field rep faces? Failed attempts to create a strong first impression because they got there late for the meeting scheduled with the customer? Losing time in searching locations, then time spent while attending a face to face meeting with the client? Well, all of this is old news with Maplytics Route Optimization. Optimized routes directly translate to shorter travel times for meeting customers as well as cost savings with minimal fuel utilization. With a focus on eliminating hurdles that come between the customers and field reps, customer satisfaction levels are guaranteed to take a positive incline in numbers and reviews.

Route optimization makes it simple and efficient for users to follow routes and reach customers within minutes! Users can choose the mode of transport like Driving, Walking, Transit or Truck and view the route. Once they have a route plotted on the route, they can easily use smart routing options to add, remove, or reorder waypoints to update their routes.

Users can also choose to select ‘Avoiding highways’ and ‘Avoiding toll roads’ or to “see the traffic” to step up their in-field productivity and save time. These routes can then be followed easily using turn-by-turn navigation with Google Maps or Waze App for accurate directions and reliable client meets.

Here are some stats that serve as evidence to optimization efficiency – Optimized Routing can improve 10-30% of your sales person operating costs and time savings while effective fleet management and routing can bring down costs by 30%. Overall, users have a sure-shot way to improve sales person’s on-road efficiency through Route Optimization.

Territory Management

Territory management is essential while handling large geographical sales/service areas. More than 65% of organizations feel that they do not have an effective Territory management tool. Territory Designing Tools increases organization’s Sales Objectives by 10% or higher. Territories based on geographical regions or customer groups are assigned to a particular salesperson or a group of salespersons to ensure the segregation of customers is clear. Maplytics help the users in this quite efficiently. Now users can organize and plan their territory with the most efficient mix of Geographical & CRM Data. Users can even Auto Create territories to save time and generate balanced territories as well as save territories as drafts to liberate themselves from the worry of losing any territory creation work under progress.

As a rule, a customer attended is a customer retained. Territory Management translates the daunting task of distributing large geographical areas into territories to a mere set of clicks for the managers using Maplytics. This allows customer retention and timely servicing to happen by introducing effective work-distribution and organization throughout the expanse of your business operations spanning multiple geographic locations.

If you think the above mentioned features can aid your organization in their goals, well this is just the tip of the iceberg, you can learn much more about what Maplytics can do. With competition on the rise, it’s time to get with the latest technology and start geo-targeting your prospects and audience for maximum ROI on your sales, service and marketing efforts. You can start your 15 day trial here. You can also head over to Microsoft AppSource, check the 5 star Maplytics reviews and Preferred Solution badge before deciding to hit the download button.

Maplytics is one of the Productivity Apps in the Inogic productivity apps suite, each product is a Preferred Microsoft Solution for Dynamics 365 CRM solutions. For more information or to get a free demo on any of these apps, connect with Encore.

So until next time – stay healthy and stay safe!