Business owners and managers understand the importance of automation when it comes to running their businesses efficiently. However, there is a good percentage of those who are still dragging their feet instead of embracing new technologies and moving on to the future.
The truth is that they find it easy to rely on processes that have been tested over time, but then this poses a challenge when it comes to decreasing repetitive tasks, increasing productivity, maximizing profits, and boosting customer engagement.
APIs (Applications Programming Interfaces) are the solution for every business that wants to boost customer engagement. They allow applications to communicate and share information. But how can using APIs boost your customer engagement and what do you need to achieve this?
Choosing an API Management Platform
Before you start using APIs, you need to choose the right API management platform. API management can be defined as the process involved when overseeing different API functions such as controlling, documenting, analyzing, and distributing APIs in a secure and scalable environment.
You can choose a platform from the best open source API management tools to ensure that you have the right environment to manage your APIs. This is crucial when it comes to the success of your APIs.
After choosing a management platform, you can start using APIs to boost your customer engagement.
How APIs Can Boost Your Customer Engagement
Customer Service
You can use APIs to boost your customer engagement by adding interfaces for online chatting. This way, your employees can engage customers directly in real-time, especially those who prefer an online chat to emails or phone calls.
Today, customers want to visit an application or a website and engage with representatives of the company without having to leave the app to make a call. This is something that can be done with online chats embedded into the app.
APIs have made this possible. Today, we have developers building APIs that come with interfaces for live chats. With this, you will improve the customer experience while, at the same time, boosting engagement.
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Payment Options
Imagine a situation where you have developed an amazing eCommerce store where you sell smartphones. When a customer places an order, they proceed to checkout and have to enter all their information, including card details, to make a payment.
This is poor customer engagement. Instead, you can use an API in collaboration with leading payment merchants such as PayPal. During checkout, your customers do not have to enter all this information since they can make payments using one of these platforms.
At the end of the day, you will have saved your customers a lot of time and frustration, and provided them with a good customer experience. This boosts customer engagement.
Sign Up/Login Options
Taking the example of the eCommerce store above, how much information would your customers have to provide you with for them to create an account? With APIs, you should not be doing this if you want to boost your customer engagement.
For example, you can use an API from Google, Twitter, or Facebook to allow users to create an account using their information from these platforms. This way, you will also gain access to some of the most important social media metrics from your users.
In addition to improving engagement, you can use this information to tailor your products or services to meet the requirements of your customers.
Reducing Duplicate Information
You can also rely on APIs to reduce duplication in a bid to boost customer engagement. For instance, you can use APIs to collect all related information in your company to ensure that your customers do not have to enter this information manually.
A good example would be what credit card companies and banks do. When creating an online account with a credit card company, you are allowed to add billing and shipping addresses to your profile.
When initiating a transaction in a bank, the bank can use APIs to pull the addresses from your credit card profile without you having to enter them manually. This boosts customer engagement.
Streamlining Operations
Customers have become more tech-savvy and want to access all the services that they need with minimal or no interactions with the service provider. To achieve this, you need to use APIs for sharing information.
This way, you will be reducing human errors while at the same time making customer interactions efficient, something that you need to boost customer engagement.
In conclusion, APIs are the game changer when it comes to customer engagement and streamlining of operations. Every business needs to adopt the use of APIs as early as now to ensure that their customers get what they need all the time.
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