Count Them: 5 Ways You Can Improve Customer Experience Using Web Data

“Stop comparing yourself to others” is the best advice a parent can give. But in the business world, this quote can be more harmful than helpful.

In today’s dynamic business climate, the consumer experience stands as the modern frontline.

Although many businesses recognize the value of providing excellent customer service, there is still a significant difference in customer expectations and company standards.

Far more than raising product ratings or reducing the waiting time is at stake in its relationship with the consumers. An insightful understanding of the consumer’s journey entails discovering what consumers go through from the very first moment they decide to buy a product; and then try to make the process as straightforward, transparent, and effective as possible.

The scope of this article is to emphasize the importance of collecting valuable insights that surround a business, what kind of information you should strive for, how to obtain it, and how to use the data in a competitive advantage.

Why customer experience should be a top concern for you

Companies are racing in a best-deals industry that is known to be multi-touchpoint, multi-channel, and hypercompetitive.

When we talk about business prosperity, it’s all about keeping customers at the nucleus of what a company does and ensuring that they have a flawless experience across all touchpoints.

This means that providing a unique consumer journey would be decisive in achieving consistent profits over time. Besides, those who have had an especially positive or negative encounter with an organization will most certainly be the loudest.

So let’s carefully listen to what they have to say.

How? By using a web scraper

Knowledge and awareness are the foundation for vigorous strategy when it comes to research and development. The Internet is a goldmine of data waiting to be used in boosting your business and vision.

To get access to such data, you need three things: an Internet connection, a web scraper, and of course, determination.

I’ll focus on the second point and discuss in further detail what is a web scraper and how it can be used to your advantage.

Data extraction — explained

A Web Scraper is a data-gathering tool, a robot if you may, who can collect desired information available on the Internet: prices, reviews, block texts, you name it. This digital fella will thoroughly scrape every website you command him to, bringing home a spreadsheet containing data in a readable format.

If you have more curiosities about the processes, go ahead and discover All you need to know about Web Scraping. And a little more.

How to use web scraping to improve customer experience

1. Gain Market Intelligence

When considering the competition analysis, it’s not really about reinventing the wheel. It’s more about discovering the techniques that have been tried by others, their outcome, making you aware of the whole marketing landscape that helps you measure, match, and even surpass their results.

Market intelligence is a powerful tool that anchors marketing strategies to success. You can use web data to generate leads, monitor search engine rankings, identify ideal customer profiles, and develop content tailored to the customer.

2. Conduct sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis, also known as Opinion Mining, is the process of identifying positive, negative, or neutral feelings in text data, such as reviews or comments.

Sentiment analysis is nowadays a powerful instrument for monitoring and understanding consumer experience as users nowadays share their opinions more freely than ever before.

Once you know the true reputation of your brand, you can optimize marketing efforts accordingly.

On top of all that, you can use this technique to monitor customers’ feelings regarding the competition, in order to understand what they are doing wrong, or even to discover desired features that you could implement before them.

3. Improve the product based on reviews

Even if we’re talking about laptops, dental services, or a new lamp, it’s an uncommon behavior to instinctively make a purchase decision without browsing through several customer reviews.

A sharp vision about why you need feedback from customers is a massive agent in optimizing user experience and establishing a positive online presence.

However, manually tracking down countless reviews and mentions traveling across the Internet is nearly impossible. This is the best scenario that clearly illustrates the role of a web scraper that can collect ratings from thousands of websites at once. And that’s pretty amazing.

Only after a business has real-time data on its effectiveness can it build an environment that customers enjoy.

4. Build dynamic product listings

A great majority of users settle for purchase only after visiting various websites to compare prices.

And this is why comparison shopping engines have arisen in the retailing game. The ultimate objective is to collect valuable product details from the competition, such as pricing and descriptions so that shoppers can find the best value possible.

As you may already have guessed by now, this trend is primarily powered by web scraping methodology, which can save time and increase efficiency for the entire inventory system.

It goes without saying that merchants can freely build their own pricing strategy. Still, such data is also more helpful when it is used in the market’s setting and will be even more beneficial in developing an efficient and outstanding pricing approach.

So, if you want to offer your customers the hottest deals possible, you must continuously monitor and track competitors’ descriptions, photos, and prices.

5. Create quality & helpful content

A web scraper can help you obtain an enormous volume of data on competition’s content in a friendly and easily readable format to inspire content creation.

Although it can be very tempting, one should not copy the entire written entity of a competitor. What they should do instead is to focus on the strengths and differences of their business rival.

The chances are that your main competitor addresses a niched range of topics within its content. In fact, that content is fully based on the company’s strengths, areas where its product succeeds.

And this opens a sparkling window of opportunity for you. How?

By gathering information about their content, you can talk about the topics they don’t. This way, you can attract the audience your competitors left aside. Sometimes it is better to stop competing on someone else’s battleground and build your own by concentrating your strategy and resources on this new, unsatisfied audience.

Web scraping can be your key to growth

The most successful businesses are those who can steer their company through a fierce marketing ecosystem and manage to do it even better than their competitors.

By recognizing the competitor websites as priceless treasures of information, you can identify spheres of great opportunity for your business growth.

Thanks to today’s technology advancements, it’s effortless to access automated processes of data harvesting. The good news is that you no longer have to collect the desired information manually. A web scraper will help you achieve the same results but much more efficiently, helping you articulate your position to succeed in the market.

All you have to do is find the best provider for your needs. And for doing so, we recommend visiting this article about Scraping Essential Tools: 10 Best Web Scraping APIs