5 Reasons to Use APIs to Unleash Your Data

“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. This article addresses five of the key advantages to be gained from having programmatic access to data enrichment resources and delves into the transformative potential that API data has to offer.

1. Automate and Improve Data Quality

Using API data for 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, API data driven enrichment automatically updates your data with valuable contextual information, minimizing the chances that you’ll be working with outdated or inaccurate data. You will know more about who your customers are, where they live, their family status, 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. Save Time and Money

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 make it possible to fully automate core data enrichment activities, freeing up valuable members of your team to focus on 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.

APIs operate around the clock, enriching and updating your data in real time. In today’s hypercompetitive business climate, real-time decision-making gives companies an edge over their rivals. The real-time advantage can be especially valuable in industries where information moves quickly and changes frequently.

3. Collaborate, Customize, and Scale

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.

4. Get the Complete Picture

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 especially important 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. Our APIs offer a flexible and scalable architecture that enables your organization to adapt to the rapidly changing demands of a highly dynamic economic climate.

• 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. 
• Enrichment APIs offer a comprehensive view of each property, including the complex data relationships between buildings, parcels, addresses, property attributes, and points of interest and more.

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.