Data decays over time—phone numbers change, companies shift locations, or people move jobs. Data changes, and stale data is expensive.
It is estimated that, on average, organizations lose $15 million each year due to bad data. What’s even worse, teams spend close to 50% of their time cleaning and prepping data—time that could be better spent creating value by solving real business problems.
While you can manually update your database, a better (and more effective) alternative is using an application programming interface (API) for data sharing and enrichment.
What is an API?
An API is a set of coding-based rules that allows two applications to talk to one another. It is the messenger that takes requests and tells a system what you want it to do, and then returns the response back to you.
Think of an API as a server at a restaurant. There is a full menu of meals for you to choose from, and a kitchen that will prepare it for you. But something needs to happen in between you deciding which dish you want, and having the kitchen prepare it. That is, something (the server) needs to communicate what you want to the chef who will then prepare it, and then have it sent back to you by the server.
Ultimately, APIs are what allow for connectivity between all of the applications we use on a daily basis, and they rely on updated, accurate data.
How to use APIs for data enrichment & management
Programmers and developers make data available to the public by exposing endpoints. That is, they publish certain parts of the language they’ve used to develop their program.
Other programmers, developers, data management teams, etc., can then pull that data by building URLs or using HTTP to request information from those endpoints.
When you take out the human component and replace it with a program, application, or software, you have an API—allowing one program to request data from another. But that information is only as good as the information it contains.
Again, this is where an API can help. You can program your API to continuously update any given data request in order to ensure the information you’re receiving is the most up-to-date.
How to get data updates via ZoomInfo and Enrich API
The developer-friendly ZoomInfo API enables automated, real-time access and enrichment of B2B data in any workflow, tech stack, or business solution. Powered by the ZoomInfo Data Cloud and covering the broadest, deepest and highest quality B2B data, ZoomInfo API makes it easy and convenient to search and enrich data from millions of company and contact profiles covering 300+ unique data points.
You can use the ZoomInfo API to query the database, then enrich the data records in your CRM, Marketing Automation platform, and other systems your business uses.