Why Smart Companies Use Web Data Extraction Software: Replace Busy Work

For many organizations, monitoring and collecting data is an essential part of operations that requires a significant investment of time, money, and effort. However, many organizations devote their high-value human capital toward tedious tasks that could — and should — be automated.

Instead of the manual and cumbersome process of using individuals to monitor multiple web sources, track important activity, and flag content changes, smart companies are turning to web data extraction software (often referred to as web scraping). These tools can effectively replace repetitious tasks with faster, more scalable processes that allow people to do what they do best.

Are your employees spending their time effectively? Or are their workdays consumed with “busy work” that prevents them from contributing in analytical and strategic ways? Here’s how web data extraction can automate the monitoring and collection of data to ensure data integrity, benefit your company culture, and raise your bottom line:

1. Boost employee engagement.

A recent Gallup survey found only one-third of employees are engaged at work. This employee engagement issue is due in large part to the types of work they are being tasked with. By nature, “busy work” forces employees to disengage in order to endure tedious yet time-consuming tasks such as data collection, which can often take a single employee hours or days to complete.

This isn’t just an employee wellness concern; it also affects performance: research shows that unhappy employees are 10% less productive. Companies should see this as an invitation to boost employees’ workplace happiness and efficiency by offering more engaging and meaningful work, as well as the tools that help facilitate that.

2. Optimize your essential resources.

Sixty-percent of employees place the greatest importance on “the ability to do what they do best in a role.” Workers want employers that allow them to make the most of their strengths. By leveraging a sophisticated web scraping tool, companies can replace mundane, tedious tasks with faster, more reliable processes for scaling data collection.

Once your employees know which sites they need to be monitoring, they can automate the data collection piece so that they can spend their time analyzing and acting on the insights gathered. Relegating the grunt work to a data-collection tool means that your employees get to focus on the part of their job they find most challenging and engaging.

3. Maximize your bottom line.

“Busy work” not only reduces employee engagement, satisfaction and retention– it also has a serious impact on the bottom line. Recent numbers suggest poor worker engagement is estimated to cost US companies roughly $450-$550 billion annually. When employees’ entire days (and sometimes weeks) are devoted to data collection, their knowledge, skills, and experience aren’t being used in the most effective way.

When companies start using a web scraping tool, they can be more efficient in utilizing their resources. Put your existing employees in the roles that they will fit best and focus on hiring people who provide real value to your business.

Connotate is a web data extraction platform that leverages machine learning to recognize patterns and harvest data using visual extraction, automatically adapting to change. Connotate’s patented approach to web content extraction goes far beyond traditional web crawlers and fragile custom scripts to turn the web’s big data into a worldwide database. We combine advanced machine learning with a visual understanding of how websites work – making extraction scalable, precise and reliable.

With Connotate, data-centric organizations can dramatically increase their web content harvesting capacity, drive down their web content extraction costs, and radically reduce the complexity of their downstream data operations — all while reducing busy work and increasing employee engagement, satisfaction, and productivity.

If you’d like to replace “busy work” at your company by automating your web data monitoring and collection efforts, learn more about Connotate and request a consultation.