Earlier this year we launched a full API for MasterVision. This means that the complete single customer view which MasterVision provides can now also be accessed automatically via another program. This powerful new feature effectively creates a central ‘hub’ of master data for all your other systems. Here are a few clever ways in which that can be used:
1. Automated list extraction
Publishers often use MasterVision to cross-refer many different sources of data (authors, subscriptions, usage, and more) and then extract customer lists for key segments every week. The API makes it possible to fully automate this type of activity, so a member of staff no longer needs to log in and extract those lists manually. The relevant files can just be scheduled to refresh on your local network each week, without any human intervention required.
2. Cleaning and gap filling
Let’s imagine your author database has missing countries for some people, but your subscriptions system does have that info. Since MasterVision connects all of the known data about each contact into a single master record, then each source system can fill any gaps by using MasterVision as a central bridge between different systems. In this example, a single API request could discover the missing country info for each of those authors – improving the overall quality of your author database.
3. Smarter registrations
Most publishers have several points of registration for customers, who may be signing up as authors, members, event attendees, and so on. With MasterVision as a central data hub, it becomes possible to spot existing known contacts at the point of registration (e.g. by looking up their email address with an API call as soon as they’ve entered it), at which point they might be given fewer fields to fill in, if details such as their country and institution are already known.
These are just a few examples, and API access opens up a whole range of possibilities. Having access to a central data hub of this kind is a hugely valuable asset for any publisher. And if you’re an existing client and would like to make use of these kinds of features, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
The DataSalon Blog 