By 2025, the total amount of data in the world will reach a staggering 163 zettabytes (ZB) as per IDC research reports. With data growing at an exponential rate, we need platforms like Datahut to collect this data and make more sense out of it. Datahut was founded in 2015 with a mission to democratise web data. Tony and his team are working towards a future where people with no coding skills are able to leverage the use of internets data to make critical business decisions.
And lately, Datahut has started getting more clients from their website by adding a chatbot. They shifted from a live chat tool towards the chatbot solution and is reportedly getting 5 times better results.
The Art of Web Scraping
To simply state it, web scraping means to extract data from a website. But it's the way data extraction is done and the reports it generates that ultimately decides the value of scraping. You may have access to an extensive array of data about your competitors, but that doesn't give you the necessary edge over them. The trick is to figure out, what's important and having the information as quickly as possible. Extracting data at scale from multiple websites on a regular basis is a tough task - especially for non-techies. Datahut is solving this specific problem.
There are plenty of things you can automate with web scraping. Below we have made a list of a few of the use-cases. Once you go through, you will understand how web scraping is being used. You may already know businesses that have created a service out of the following applications. Who knows? Maybe you will find a use-case of your own.
- Build a custom news feed service by aggregating from the websites you read news from.
- Get a list of jobs posted on various career platforms and compare the salary packages being offered.
- Compare the price of a product from what is offered on various e-commerce sites.
- Use the pricing information from your competitors to set a competitive price for your product.
- Know where and when customers are mentioning about you online.
- Also, understand the customer sentiment and feedback of your competitors.
- Get the best prices for hotels and flights using the aggregation technique.
- Get insights into the strategies used by Competitors for SEO and Social Media.
A Strong Player
There is a big reason, the team at Collect.chat admires Datahut. That's because, just like Collect.chat, Datahut is also a bootstrapped company. It's not easy to be a bootstrapped player in the B2B segment of the data extraction business. But they have pulled it through. This is evident of the quality of service they provide and the 49-member strong team that they have.
Datahut caters to a large number of customers including Boston Consulting Group, Workday, L.E.K Consulting and more. Their sweet spot is in the e-commerce industry. If you are an e-commerce player, then you may know how hard it is to set up the prices of the products you sell. You need to cross-reference the prices of similar products and change it to maximise profit. The volatility in prices very high and hence it is necessary to have a service where you can monitor these fluctuations at ease. Datahut can do that and doesn't require you to have any coding knowledge. Their service model is to provide Data as a Service (DaaS).
What I loved about Collect.chat is the simplicity of the bot builder interface. I could build my bots in minutes with Collect.chat where as other platforms took hours of python coding to get it right. The support from the Collect.chat team was amazing and I highly recommend them.
- Tony, Founder of Datahut
After Using the Chatbot
The team at Datahut uses our chatbot solution on their landing pages and inside their blog. Their primary use-case is in lead generation. Earlier they were using a Live chat plugin to interact with their visitors. But the dilemma was that they couldn't attend to their audience coming from the other part of the world during the night. That was also the time that they had most of the traffic to their website. The number of conversions was hardly 3 to 4 per week.
Then they heard about our product after someone referred it to them. The change was instant. Now every week, they are getting 15-20 conversions on the chatbot. That's almost a 5 times increase! The other significant advantage in Tony's words is:
The bot first approach to customer interaction saves a lot of time. When using the Live chat tool, I had to be on the alert all the time. But now I can qualify them, before making the first connection. I leave the link to my calendar and my leads will arrange a meeting from there. So it's all working smoothly.
Switch from Live Chat to Bot-First
Live chat support is expensive and requires more human-resources. In effect, you are wasting your most precious resource, time! It should be reserved for you paid customers to give them a better experience. As for your website visitors who are curious to know about your business, you should leave the job to chatbots, just like how Datahut has done it.
It's time to have a bot-first approach for your website to convert leads. Here is how you can start.
