The importance of data for business is hard to overstate. Companies want as much data as possible and of the highest possible quality. Thus, whatever kind and volume of data a firm owns, it can always be increased or enriched. Data is said to be enriched when the datasets of the company are supplemented by high-quality data from a reputable third-party source. Data enrichment service is among the most important kinds of data-related services offered by data providers.
Taking care of data
Data is clearly one of the most valuable assets the company can own. However, its value is highly dependent on how it is managed. To truly benefit from utilizing data one must first take proper care of it.
Data enrichment is one of the ways to do it. As such it is a part of the broader data wrangling process which aims at structuring and cleaning data to make it more usable and therefore more valuable to the company. The enrichment part of this procedure combines the data owned with additional data from a third-party source to make it more informative.
Enriched data becomes a fuller set of information, thus being able to provide better insights and more trustworthy understanding of the subject. Additionally, enriching data helps to remove errors and fill in the missing parts, thus improving the quality of the dataset. The data then becomes more valid, more accurate and generally more relevant.
Thus, whatever the goal of a particular dataset is, enriching data is crucial to taking care and using this asset properly. This means that data enrichment services add a lot of value to the company and should be considered when looking for ways to get more out of data.
Five things to know
Clearly, properly managing your data is at least as important as having the data in the first place. And data enrichment is a pivotal part of such well-guided management. Here are 5 things worth noting when considering data enrichment service.
1) Data enrichment is cost-efficient. This means that as compared to just internally collecting as much data as possible it makes more sense to enrich the datasets in order to enhance their value. This is because a lot of randomly collected unstructured and poor-quality data is never used for actual business benefits. Thus, resources can be moved from storing such data to acquiring data that would enrich the information that is actually used. In the end, this will lead to cost-effective usage of the data-handling resources.
2) It is an ongoing process. Nothing stands still and that especially goes for information, thus, like many procedures, data enrichment is not something that should be done once and then forgotten. Even data of the highest quality can age very fast or become less relevant when we want to use the dataset for a different goal. Thus, it is important to perform data enrichment periodically or whenever circumstances demand it. The value brought back by enriched data will certainly make it worthwhile.
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3) It improves customer experience. Data about the customers is what allows companies to ensure high-quality service. Based on data, firms can make personalized offers and anticipate customer needs thus preparing in advance. When the quality of data is lacking so will the customer lack satisfaction in the provided services. Data enrichment helps to understand the customers better thus making sure that nothing important is missed.
4) Enrichment promotes consistency. The bigger the company is or the more data it stores, the greater is the risk of inconsistencies of that data. This means both inconsistent quality and inconsistent information. Data enrichment helps to remove these inconsistencies by unifying the quality of different datasets and removing redundancies that distort the knowledge of how much valuable data is actually owned by the company.
5) Data enrichment boosts both marketing and sales. Enriched data can generate more and better-quality leads. Additionally, it is more useful when creating targeted marketing campaigns, as full information about the lead is needed in order to properly target them. Finally, sales intelligence is much more useful when the data is enriched as it allows to create a well-informed sales approach, suited for a particular potential customer.
Find the data you need
When looking to enhance the value of your data through enrichment, the thing to start from is by identifying the kind of data that is needed. Datasets need to be enriched with relevant data that supplements that information that is already in them.
In order to find such data, one should look for providers that own a lot of different data and offer broad access to their databases. This would increase the probability of locating the kind of data that is needed in a specific case. Knowing that what has been acquired is actually useful, one can proceed with data enrichment with confidence.
