“Data is a key ingredient in deeper insights, more informed decisions, and clearer execution. Advanced firms establish practices to ensure data quality, build data fabrics, and apply insights where they matter most. Respondents from advanced firms are almost three times more likely than beginners to prioritize using insights for decision-making (66% versus 25%, respectively) and 1.5 times more likely to cite their work with third-party service providers to commercialize their data as an important initiative over the last 12 months (44% versus 28%, respectively).” —Forrester
In today’s hyper-connected global economy, effective data-driven decision-making is the key to competitive advantage. Data quality and contextual depth are essential elements of an effective data-driven strategy. That’s why data enrichment, including geospatial context, has become such an important component of any successful data analytics rollout.
Application programming interfaces (APIs) offer a wide range of benefits, accelerating and enhancing data integrity initiatives. Let’s dive into five key benefits of using APIs for data enrichment, and explore their overall transformative potential.
1. Enhanced data quality and accuracy
Using APIs for data enrichment significantly enhances data quality and accuracy by linking internal corporate data to credible, carefully curated external data sources. That gives business users in your organization the confidence that the data they are using to make decisions is trustworthy and up to date.
By augmenting your existing customer data with rich demographic detail, for example, API-driven enrichment automatically updates your data with valuable contextual information, minimizing the chances that you’ll be working with outdated or inaccurate data. You’ll discover more about who your customers are, where they live, their income level, and much more.
Customer address information, in particular, is often at the root of pervasive data quality problems. By programmatically accessing highly accurate, fully validated address data, you can automate the process of maintaining high data quality.
2. Time and cost efficiencies
APIs offer a means of automating essential processes that enhance business value. In most organizations, data enrichment is a costly and time-consuming activity. Data specialists often spend significant amounts of time gathering, retrieving, and validating data from multiple sources.
APIs operate around the clock, enriching and updating your data in real time. This frees up your team members to focus on more strategic initiatives. Instead of collecting, organizing, and preparing data for analysis, they can concentrate their efforts on using the data intelligently to generate business value.
Real-time data enrichment ensures your data stays current and relevant, which gives you an edge over the competition. This is especially valuable in industries like e-commerce, where live user activity informs personalized product recommendations.
3. Collaboration, customization, and scalability
APIs allow for a high degree of customization. Companies can fine-tune their data enrichment to fit their exact requirements. Furthermore, by embedding data enrichment into their core business applications, organizations can reap the benefits of accuracy and contextual richness at scale. They can adapt those customizations as their business requirements change, bringing in new data sources and applying new parameters when necessary.
Organizations that use data enrichment APIs also benefit from better collaboration across departments and platforms. Many companies struggle to integrate disparate systems such as ERP, CRM, and specialized operational applications. For example, when customer address information is out of sync across those various systems, it leads to errors and inconsistencies.
APIs make it easier to update and integrate business applications, ensuring that everyone is operating from the same playbook.
eBook
This ebook explores the advantages of using APIs for data enrichment and the transformative impact they have on businesses.
4. Comprehensive insights
APIs enable organizations to tap into a diverse array of data sources, offering a complete picture of the things that matter most. Most companies, for example, already use customer purchase history, location, and a few other parameters to segment their audience for marketing offers.
Data enrichment offers distinct advantages, enhancing the accuracy of location information, filling in important demographic and lifestyle data, and highlighting previously unseen factors that play a very important role in purchasing behavior.
By accessing real-time or near-real-time data using APIs, organizations can make sound decisions using the latest information available. This is particularly crucial in sectors like finance and healthcare, where rapid decision-making is often critical.
5. Simplify Compliance
APIs make it possible to enrich data without running afoul of data privacy laws. Working with reputable providers who understand and fully adhere to regulatory compliance, organizations can ensure that their data enrichment activities conform to all the necessary standards. This dramatically reduces the risks associated with data breaches and regulatory action.
Data enrichment APIs improve data quality, enable real-time analytics, save time and resources, and improve organizational agility. They provide a complete picture of the things that matter and improve collaboration while ensuring compliance with stringent data privacy laws.
Leverage Precisely APIs
As the global leader in data integrity, Precisely helps you deliver outstanding business value for your organization. Most data professionals spend 80 percent of their time preparing data for use. Only about 20 percent of their time is available for high-value activities that lead to increased revenue, reduced costs, and transformative strategic decisions.
The Precisely Data Integrity Suite offers everything you need to deliver accurate, consistent, contextual data to your business users – wherever and whenever it’s needed. APIs are essential to keeping that promise.
The Suite Developer Portal offers APIs served by a flexible and scalable architecture so businesses and applications can adapt to changing demands, improve efficiency, support growth, and stay competitive in a rapidly evolving technology landscape – while reducing operational costs and technical debt.
- Precisely Geo Addressing APIs allow you to capture, cleanse, standardize, verify, geocode, and enrich addresses to unlock valuable context for more informed decision-making. Truly powerful data-powered insights hinge on high-quality geo addressing.
- The Data Graph API exposes a vast network of connected data and leverages pre-established relationships between datasets for easy enrichment and accessibility. Available data categories include address, property, business, natural hazards, boundaries, demographics, and more. Each dataset is given a unique identifier for an addressable location, the PreciselyID, allowing for easy linkage and interaction across our entire portfolio.
Precisely APIs enable your organization to automate the process of cleansing, consolidating, geocoding, and enriching very large volumes of data in a fraction of the time that it currently takes. Our API data is just one part of our comprehensive Precisely Data Integrity Suite, giving you a unified, fully integrated framework for building competitive advantage with better data-driven decisions.
Ready to learn more about how Precisely APIs can drive value for your business? Download our free ebook today, Data Unleashed: 5 Benefits of Harnessing APIs for Your Applications.
