APIs: The Cornerstone of Exceptional Customer Experience

As technology reshapes industries, enterprises face mounting pressure to accelerate digital transformation, enhance customer experiences and unlock new revenue streams. To stay competitive, organizations must foster a digital-ready culture that empowers business units to build connected experiences.

A key enabler of this transformation is API orchestration. By integrating systems, unifying data and using APIs (application programming interfaces) to connect applications, businesses can streamline operations, enhance agility and drive IT innovation – without the need to develop every capability from scratch.

Deliver a Better Customer Experience (CX) with APIs

To stay relevant, businesses must design systems and strategies that track customer behaviors and predict their needs. APIs are key to this, enabling a seamless, integrated customer experience.

For example, when a lead fills out a form, they don’t want to repeatedly enter that same information across different touchpoints. They expect a system that remembers their details and provides a friction-free journey. Adopting an API-first approach can ensure consistent, seamless customer interactions across every channel, helping you deliver better experiences.

Increase customer conversion through omnichannel engagement

Engaging customers across multiple channels – like SMS, voice and email – gets complicated when each channel is supported by several APIs. Integrating these channels and APIs seamlessly can be a challenge, making it difficult to deliver smooth, end-to-end customer experiences.

An omnichannel API platform helps businesses integrate these channels, eliminating issues like reporting inconsistencies, additional development time and the confusion of disconnected systems. It also empowers companies to redefine their outreach and engagement strategies through parallel and sequential marketing campaigns.

With an omnichannel API platform, businesses can drive customer awareness through context-based, personalized campaigns. They can also achieve a unified view across all channels, maximizing user engagement. Most importantly, they can reduce their reliance on multiple channel APIs.

Unlock data-driven democracy

Businesses that can unlock, analyze and use their data effectively open new opportunities – but many organizations struggle with their data that’s locked in older systems or scattered across different platforms.

This is where API-led connectivity comes in. APIs connect different software and systems to easily share and access data, even from older systems – offering you a full picture of operations and customers.

This approach makes data more accessible to both internal teams and external partners. With all your information in one place, you can create informed, relevant experiences for your customers.

Accelerate implementation timelines

The market is undergoing rapid change and there’s no time for lengthy, year-long projects. APIs are the key to scaling business operations quickly. APIs connect you to new functionality fast – without a large, time-consuming manual development lift. This lets you adapt quickly and seamlessly to new customer needs.

Boost workflow agility and speed

Implementing an API-led architecture allows technical teams to focus on important business issues as they arise, without getting bogged down by complex tasks. The flexibility of low-code or no-code API development, offered by many modern iPaaS platforms, makes this possible. By reusing existing APIs, organizations can avoid reinventing the wheel, speed up development time and get products to market faster.

Improve internal efficiency for sales and service teams

APIs not only improve customer experience but also streamline internal operations. By connecting various applications and systems and integrating data in real-time, APIs provide sales, marketing and service teams with an up-to-date view of each customer’s history. This enables teams to better understand customer needs, pain points, preferences and buying behavior – allowing them to better anticipate future needs. It reduces inefficiencies like the “swivel chair syndrome” and improves employee satisfaction.

Take advantage of the growing API client market

An API client acts as an intermediary, enabling developers to send requests and receive responses, ensuring seamless communication between systems. API clients help ensure smooth integration and responsiveness across various touchpoints, providing the foundation for personalized and efficient interactions with customers.

Modern API clients prioritize user-friendly interfaces, simplifying API request creation and submission. Automation features streamline workflows by enabling scripting, integration with CI/CD pipelines and scheduled testing. With distributed teams becoming more common, collaboration tools like shared workspaces and real-time version control are essential. Security is also a top priority, with advanced features for authentication and compliance. Additionally, API clients are increasingly integrated with other development tools and support multiple protocols and formats, offering versatility and improved productivity.

How Material Boosted API Management Performance for a Telecom Provider 

A major telecom provider in the Philippines was struggling with high volumes of support issues and complaints due to slow SMS delivery. This delay also affected developers who relied on time-sensitive messaging for their applications. While its Apigee API platform managed a significant SMS throughput, its capacity was bottlenecked by legacy infrastructure limitations. The provider needed a solution to resolve these delays without making changes to its internal core systems.

Material optimized their API management platform without altering any core systems. This required implementing a federated API platform, migrating key APIs and enhancing the developer experience with a new portal and built-in FaaS (function as a service).

The impact was significant. API throughput increased 10X, while prioritized queuing improved load balancing. Support tickets dropped by 80%. With a streamlined API productization strategy, the telecom provider is now positioned to expand into new services like IoT, assured identity and direct-carrier billing.

Go API-First with Material

An API-first strategy is essential to maintaining digital agility – this includes the ability to quickly roll out new features to your customers, gather data from multiple channels to better understand consumer behavior and deliver experiences that create engagement and drive growth.

If you’d like to learn how Material can help you adopt an API-first approach to building better customer experiences, reach out and let’s start the conversation.