We live in a world where we can easily Google for just about anything. But what if the data you need isn’t in a search engine? Or even in a purchased list?
Emerging markets are the future of the global economy… but as an emerging market professional, you know it’s hard to get the hyper-local business data you need. Most of the small businesses you’re targeting aren’t online and many are halfway across the world.
Since 2016, we at dataPlor have been solving this problem head-on. Our process combines locally-sourced manpower, mobile technology, and multi-step verification to collect data on-site. We’ve trained tens of thousands of vetted data contributors — called Explorers — equipped with our proprietary application to gather small business information and geo-location in-person. For our clients, the Explorers become their own “boots on the ground” network, capable of collecting thousands of data records daily.
The result? You get more reliable insights for hard-to-reach emerging market places like salons, grocery stores, restaurants, and other small businesses that might not have an online presence.
Our team has rolled out customization and mapping enhancements that provide a more complete, integrated solution for gathering data. Collect unprecedented data and insights from small businesses across the globe with these new features.
Data Augmentation via Custom-mapping
Our new feature, custom-mapping, was developed to address a real client issue.
One of dataPlor’s clients — a prominent ride-sharing company — had a problem: they needed stronger geolocation data and places information in Mexico to provide to their drivers and riders. They had an unreliable data set of addresses, but no way of validating them, or collecting additional information about the businesses a rider might need to know (such as hours of operations, business category, image of the building, etc.)
In order to address this need, we created a custom-mapping feature to direct and guide Explorer activity. With this new functionality, we can process your location records and upload them directly into the Explorer Application. This places pins at your designated locations, along with specific unknown data fields (defined by you) to be completed by the Explorer.
Beta-testing revealed that with these visual cues, Explorers create a more streamlined, efficient plan of action for the day and their activity increases significantly.
With the ride-sharing client, custom mapping cut the data collection project length in half, and Explorer output increased by a whopping 300%. Explorers quickly found the local businesses on their application, verified the geo-location with their phone GPS, collected photos of the front of the business, as well as the additional required data fields.
Ultimately, the client was able to quickly transform a directory of locations into a valuable dynamic set of data that will make customers happier.
Scaling the Solution
As our products scale to collect more data attributes, and as the number of Explorers grows, maintaining the highest data quality standards is paramount to dataPlor’s continued success.
This ongoing need has lead to the creation of a new, always-on Verification Team. Their sole focus is to review every submitted record in real-time. Your efforts are only as good as your data. Our Verification Team greatly reduces the typical quality assurance bottleneck while maintaining quality.
These platform enhancements are officially ready for use for all clients, and our team is excited to see how we can support a number of different use cases across industries. You provide the data requirements, and we provide the people, process, and technology to deliver the highest quality results.
Contact us to learn more about how dataPlor could support your emerging market strategy.
*This blog post is sponsored by dataPlor.
