Use APIs to Create a Strong Customer Experience
Have you ever signed in to a website using your social media login? Or, maybe you’ve spoken to a company’s customer service rep through a mobile app for personalised convenience. Nowadays, people not only appreciate a personalised experience, they expect one.
But, what drives this highly personalised customer experience? These interactions are, in fact, supported by a vast network of APIs.
What are APIs
Application programming interfaces (APIs) work behind the scenes to connect and integrate various technology systems. Not only do they add value to organisations by means of heightened personalisation, but they also vastly improve customer experience through data integration.
Because data helps companies understand their customers and buyer personas, it enables customer connection on every touchpoint and platform. Hence, this level of personalisation creates an engaging customer experience (CX) that increases loyalty and drives conversion.
APIs boost customer experience
With the foundation of an API-first technology approach, the benefits to an organisation are quickly apparent:
Improved customer data
Since APIs connect modern and legacy applications, they yield the ability to apprehend and process the critical transactional and historical data that moves between systems. In brief, APIs like these can be used to generate comprehensive customer profiles to better understand their buying journeys and interactions as they navigate your brand’s channels.
Integration of disparate tech systems
Your business’s digital presence likely consists of a host of different technologies. Of course, this typically includes systems like CRM, legacy databases, and commerce or marketing platforms. Still, without the help of APIs, these disparate systems have a difficult time “talking” to each other or effectively transferring data. When these systems operate autonomously, the data becomes inaccurate, inconsistent, or gets lost. In contrast, APIs can connect these systems to enable a single, unified view of the customer and their journey.
Accelerated timelines
Companies need to remain nimble and continuously work to improve their operations, which is made possible through APIs. Consequently, APIs allow for immediate adaptation within an organisation’s technology systems and enhance the end user’s experience.
Improved agility of workflows
APIs allow businesses to easily pivot and prioritise different business issues as they arise. Indeed, with an agile framework, APIs can inspire more informed decision-making in real-time. APIs are also flexible due to their “low code” development process – accelerating your workflows and reducing duplicate development work.
Heightened internal efficiencies
APIs not only greatly benefit the end user’s experience, but they also benefit the internal business teams. In fact, through APIs, data is integrated in real-time by connecting an array of applications and systems. Accordingly, this data coherence allows marketing and sales teams to have the latest, most accurate view of a customer’s history. Thus, teams can better understand their customers, their pain points, and how to sell to them. APIs hence, boost employee satisfaction as well as increase sales and productivity.
APIs help differentiate your CX offering
As eCommerce grows and buying behaviours continue to shift, the customer journey will only get more complex. Already, the growing number and variety of customer touchpoints have made the customer journey much more complicated – requiring companies to act on data from a series of customer interactions – to deliver a seamless customer experience. Therefore, by using specific APIs, a business can coordinate between systems to deliver a differentiated customer experience offering. There’s no denying that APIs have now become a significant engine of business growth, that also enable brands to build unique end-user experiences.
