Why Harvesting Web Data Makes Good Business Sense
Blog: Kofax - Smart Process automation
In today’s hypercompetitive global economy, progressive businesses seek a competitive edge that will put them ahead of the competition and empower their business to grow. For many, one such advantage is the capacity to collect and integrate information in near real-time from sources outside their organization.
When you want to buy a product, you use sites that have aggregated the data to make it easy for comparing prices and customer reviews. When you want to invest in a certain company, you look at the company’s financials, hiring trends, and more. When you’re booking a flight, you want to make sure you get the best deal. Research is an integral part of business decision-making, and nowadays every answer we need is virtually at our fingertips.
Like the consumer, businesses also have a tremendous upside from leveraging information from the web. Here are three industries and use cases where businesses stand to gain a lot from using a web data extraction solution to get the information they need to make smarter and more informed decisions.
#1 Financial Services – Conducting Equity Research
Investment decisions depend on the most up-to-date information based on market research, extracting data from websites, and other real-time data sets. Such derived insights and forecasts can be shared with clients and drive investment debates. Without the right information, your research analysts are building models that could lack the right data. The end result is that investment managers are left without the knowledge they need to consult their clients on buy-sell decisions.
#2 Online Retail – Tracking Competitor Pricing
With the holidays rapidly approaching, every online retailer is gearing up for a profitable finish to 2015. Part of the success will come from making sure they are ahead of the game in terms of pricing and promotions.
By extracting data directly from your competitors’ websites you are able to collect thousands of pieces of information about products, pricing and availability. And most importantly, keep your organization’s product information updated and readily available to those making product and pricing decisions, ensuring a happy holiday for your business.
#3 Information Providers– Delivering Insight and Intelligence
You provide industry insight and intelligence into markets like insurance, energy, healthcare, financial services, and government. Your organization’s goal is to provide objective analysis and advice to your clients so that they can make well-informed decisions. You have the experts, the knowledge and the integrated models. But do you have all the right data?
To realize the full potential of the analysis research you provide to clients, you need a consistent and streamlined way to acquire big volumes of data—literally billions of data points.
The data is out there to be had, but without the right technology and solution the effort to acquire the information seems like an insurmountable task. Take a few moments to watch the latest on-demand webinar, explaining the importance of required capabilities for extracting data from web sites and web portals.
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