How to Use Data Mashups to Boost your Business?
Are you wondering how you can use data mashups to enhance your business performance?
With big data available today for every business from multiple sources, it is about time that every business utilizes it effectively to boost their revenue growth. Many data analytics techniques are being used for this purpose and data mashup is one of them.
Data Mashups
Mashups combine data, content, or functionality from multiple sources into one single web interface. Mashup platforms help users combine outputs of heterogeneous web services or APIs into a new data visualization that can be deployed on a web browser or as widgets.
All mashups work on aggregation, visualization, and integration. The three common categories of mashups include presentation, process, and data mashups.
Data mashups help with content filtering, aggregation, and other data transformation to achieve useful output representations for business analysts, sales, and marketing teams.
Business data is usually present in multiple formats and locations. It can be structured database records or unstructured data like emails, spreadsheets, etc.
Web services allow businesses to make all this data available without much expense and work as much required with traditional procedures of ETL for identifying, modeling, etc., of data present in just the organization’s warehouse.
Business users can now access and aggregate whatever data they need. Enterprise mashups work on a centralized repository where users can share data sources, add new data mashups, and access previous ones.
Read more on what is data mashups in our blog here.
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Using Data Mashups for Your Business Growth
Let’s discuss some of the ways you can use data mashups for your business processes.
Data Mashups for Employee Monitoring
You can create data mashups that pull data related to your employees’ performance according to your set key performance indicators. You can then analyze information to see the productivity of each employee.
For example, you can make a chart of the number of tickets an employee has taken up to resolve and the time he or she has put in on a daily or weekly basis to resolve them.
You may find that an employee has put in many hours of work but has not resolved many tickets successfully. You can then further investigate if there is any roadblock, such as your employee being overworked, doesn’t have the required expertise, being a misfit in your team, and so on.
As you can see, it is difficult to deduce such information from disparate data sources. When associated data sources are combined, a unified view of information helps in a better understanding of the situation, and ultimately better decision-making.
Data Mashups for Customer Support
You can also use the web 2 technology-based data mashups to support your customer service procedures. We know that quick and effective customer support is the key to increased sales and overall business growth.
Data mashups can help you display relevant information regarding your product/service in one place. You can integrate multiple different data sources to provide a comprehensive information desk to your customers who interact with your system for support.
One such example is of Cisco Expertise Locator mashup. It integrates Cisco employee directory data source and Cisco’s Unified Communications technology. The mashup shows the locations of employees with specific expertise mentioned in the employee directory on Google maps.
The integration with communication technology allows users to contact the required expert employee for information and assistance. In this way, data mashup helps to shorten the sales cycle and increases the business’s revenue.
Analyzing Social Media Metrics
Social media marketing has now become the norm for most businesses. To attract users with varying demographics, businesses try to market their product/service through multiple channels; social media is one of them.
Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, etc., often send traffic to a business website. You can get actionable insights into your audience by integrating your social media data with a web analytics platform, like Google Analytics.
A graphical user interface of a business intelligence platform that shows visual business metrics details from multiple data sources, like social media and the web, gives you important insights like the number of online visitors on a specific date, from a specific social media post, etc.
Such insights can help understand the preferences of your target audience and the type of online content that is working on your social media channels.
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Customer Acquisition
You can effectively use a data mashup such as a BI dashboard to improve your customer acquisition process. The sales team often monitors a purchase funnel to analyze the customer flow through various stages in a channel while interacting (buying) your product/service.
The data relating to stages of a purchase funnel your customers move quickly, the number of customers that left the customer journey from a certain stage, etc., are important for business development and sales team.
To get a comprehensive overview of purchase funnel stages (awareness, interest, consideration, preference, and conversion/purchase), you will certainly need data from multiple data sources like web applications, CRM, etc. You can integrate this data into a dashboard for better statistical analysis and action.
You can highlight your strengths and weaknesses, see if users are interested in your product anymore, work on your existing marketing and sales strategies, monitor if salespeople are able to achieve their target sales through their existing approach, etc., all via a unified interface pulling data from various sources.
IT Resources Monitoring
Data mashups can also help you monitor the performance of your IT infrastructure. For example, you can integrate the information on the number of resource users and the number of resources, say servers.
A data dashboard can help you analyze when the performance of the server spikes and when it goes down given the number of active users, increasing the server response time.
You can then plan accordingly, for example, perform load balancing or increase the number of servers.
If you have an increased number of submitted support tickets from your customers during a certain time period, you can correlate this information with the number of servers supporting your web application at that time.
Then, you can act efficiently to support your customer support team by increasing the number of support persons, etc.
Benefits of Data Mashups for your Business
Using the various approaches to data mashups, including the ones we discussed above, you will be able to avail the following benefits that will ultimately boost your business.
Increased Productivity
Data mashups shift the task of data collection and integration from technical staff to non-IT people. Business analysts and other users can easily pull data from available sources and integrate it into business intelligence applications for further analysis and monitoring.
There is no need for complex data warehousing and IT integrations to make the required data available for business users, which makes the whole process of business data analytics efficient and users more productive.
Improved Security
Businesses are able to set in place better security standards for their disparate data sources and offer a way to integrate them securely into a single graphical interface, portals, etc.
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Uniformity Across the Organization
Enterprise mashups help businesses implement a standardized process of aggregating and combining data through set protocols.
More Innovation
As all business users are able to access and integrate the required data as an enterprise mashup, they can use creative ways to combine useful metrics, devise new analytical solutions, explore more data opportunities, etc.
Planning to Use Enterprise Data Mashups?
Data mashing can help you effectively utilize your business data available in various forms from customer support chats, users’ activity on your platform, email content, flat files, etc.
Ad-hoc compositions can be made of underlying data present in multiple locations and not just available in the company’s data warehouse.
Such data mashups in the form of data visualization tools, dashboards, widgets, etc., help businesses get a better understanding of processes and make informed time-sensitive decisions.
If you are a business CEO or CTO, now is the time to invest in business data mashups. You will require a competent team of data scientists and analysts to implement the data mashup feature successfully.
You can also undertake custom software development of a data mashup application like a business intelligence dashboard. However, you will need software developers with skills in cutting-edge software development technology to develop, test, and deploy your software application successfully.
If you need such professionals with software development and data analytics expertise, DevTeam.Space can help you via its field-expert community of software developers. These software developers are experienced in building market-competitive software solutions.
Write to us your initial project specifications, and one of our account managers will get back to you for further assistance.
FAQs on Data Mashups
Mashups offer a range of benefits to businesses like increased productivity of their employees like sales and marketing teams, increased innovation and opportunities for solving business problems, standardization of data integration and reporting processes, improved security and access control across interfaces and portals, etc.
A business mashup combines heterogeneous data and applications from multiple sources into a unified platform for business purposes.
There are multiple categories of mashups, including enterprise, data, consumer, overlay mashups, etc. Consumer mashups are the most common as they are available for the general public. They can be built as an interactive tool or a web-based feature such as a widget on a web page or web app.
Alexey Semeney
Founder of DevTeam.Space
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Alexey is the founder of DevTeam.Space. He is award nominee among TOP 26 mentors of FI's 'Global Startup Mentor Awards'.
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