With Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service you may find it useful to know the location of your customer. Say you have stores all over the country, maybe it would help you to know the closest store to the potential customer. In this post I will explain how to configure GEO location settings in Omnichannel for Customer Service.

Customer Experience

Once enabled the customers may be prompted by their browser, so they will know you wish to be made aware of their location.

I’m not sure about you but I routinely click “block” on messages like this. So companies would be unlikely to track my location. But many people might not be as paranoid as me!

You might need to keep this in mind because it will be wrong to assume you’ll immediately know the location of all your customers. Below you can see that I was prompted that “powerappsportals.com” wanted to know my location. Anyway, in this example after I clicked “Allow” the chat started as normal.

Agent Experience

Below you can see that the agent can see the entire address of the customer. This is achieved on the customer summary form by clicking on the visitor details tab within the conversation summary section.

In my case this was pretty accurate … I’m actually at number 3 not number 2. I guess we can accept it being out by a few feet!!

With my VPN enabled you can see that the location becomes less reliable! I haven’t suddenly travelled to Madrid … but I have enabled my VPN which must have randomly selected a server in Spain.

Configure GEO Locations

There are there steps involved in enabling GEO locations;

1. Create a BING Maps API key.
   
2. Enable GEO location settings in Omnichannel.
   
3. Enable the location setting on your chat widget.
   

Step One – Create a BING Maps API key

Before you start you will need a Bing maps API key. Getting one is pretty simple! You can read all about the process here.

Basically you go to the bing maps dev center, https://bingmapsportal.com

Once you have registered / logged in you can go to the “My account” option. Then under the “My Keys” option you can created new keys or copy existing keys.

Step Two – Enable GEO location settings in Omnichannel

Next you will need to enter your Bing map API key into omnichannel for customer service, to do that open the omnichannel administration app. In the settings area you will find an option called “Geo Location”. In here use the new option to create a record for your Geo location provider (aka Bing).

Below you can see that I simply gave my Geo location provider a name and pasted in the API key. (It shows as “***” once you click save.)

Step Three – Enable the location setting on your chat widget

Next we can enable locations on our chat widget. Below you can see that I have again gone into my omnichannel administration app, within my chat channel option I have opened my chat widget. Then in the location tab I can enable requesting the visitor location. This simple involves selecting the geo location provider I defined in the previous step.

I think you will agreed that enabling geo locations within your chat widgets is a useful feature and one that is really easy to configure. Enjoy!