If it’s what I think it is, this is an annoying problem.

Do you have a lot of search for terms like ‘thier service+ location’? And other companies are using location based pages to rank above more general pages?

In terms of content I’d ask ‘is there enough value in having unique content for these pages? For example, stock avaialbily or delivery times may be different. Or different teams may service different regions. Or, in some cases, different regions might have different issues. For example, on the last one, I worked with a client that had to use a different type of truck to make deliveries due to the nature of the roads in some areas.

If you can give useful content to the user that justifies the page, then you can use location pages. This does not mean stuffing place names randomly in the copy. There has to be a genuine purpose to the content

If it’s basically the same content (so just contact pages) then I’d use canonical tags for individual locations (if required on the site) and just have content on the site about locations you serve, but hard to say without knowing the situation.