A great item on BBC Radio 4 this morning featured a crowd-sourcing phone application that lets members of the public report locations of abandoned shopping trolleys. These ‘geo’ apps offer both private and public sector organizations powerful extensions to their customer services. Here are four reasons why their benefits and influence go far beyond what is achieved using traditional websites:
- The prevalence of smartphones and tablets, coupled with the immediacy of apps, means far more people engage with apps compared to conventional customer web pages.
- By harnessing location, geo-apps greatly enhance the user’s experience, making services faster, simpler, and richer.
- The combination of increased usage and automatically tagged locations indicates the service provider receives far more feedback, and data that is far more useful, e.g., prioritizing repair works.
- The connected nature of apps also means service providers can provide feedback to the user showing how their report will be used to improve the issue, instead of it disappearing into a black hole. In this way, the geo-apps create a virtuous circle where the more people see how their information is working, the more they use the app, the more information is available, the smarter the decisions service managers can make.