Hello All,
I am sorry for the late reply but please find below the feedback regarding the Latitude Mapping Portal. I have only received 2 replies and they have asked me to remove any figures relating to income but both replied that the income generated wasn’t huge and that it was more about providing additional information services. Both services used staff to provide the services rather than self-service by customers. Please see below for their replies:
Is the service easy for customers to use or do they require a lot of staff input?
You get a login to their system - which is the same as the OS system so is always being updated, and with that you can generate block plans, or other bespoke plans, and even aerial photographs. Staff access it on the public enquiry desk so customers can see.
Staff might initially be a little daunted by it but once logged in - the process is very similar to using google maps. You look for an area - specify what sort of plan you want. They can print it out as a pdf - I think our planners requirements meant we did 6 copies or email it to the customer if they preferred
I can't comment on this as we market it as a service that staff do for you. There are numerous services already out there (and advertised by our council) where customers can do this for themselves. We have decided to aim for the market that do not have the ability/confidence/time to do this themselves.
Do you need A3 Printing facilities or is A4 ok?
99% of printing was A4
We only have A4 printing facilities, on the rare occasion that a customer wants A3 printing Latitude send it to the customer direct for no additional cost.
Would you recommend the portal as a means of generating income?
They invoice us every month and as we charge twice what they charge us, it does theoretically make a reasonable income, but to be honest, our level of use is quite low.
It doesn’t generate a huge amount of income but there is no initial outlay and does not involve a lot of staff time so it is a worthwhile venture for us. Any income counts!
Any other comments or issues?
We only introduced this to our three largest libraries at first and are now going to expand to others. I would say that it is worth getting latitude in to train your staff, they do this for free and it worked well. Our staff don’t seem to have any problems using the system.
It certainly worked well and Latitude were very helpful and supportive - several times coming out for training. It did used to average out at about 2-3 a month. Didn't make a great difference to our budget. However it isn't costing us anything to have and I look on it as another string to the services we provide, it gives a little income (potentially) but also it serves as a reminder to staff that we should / can / do provide fairly high level information services.
Thanks,
Catherine
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