The name of the game in automation is APIs. The Telecom API market alone is expected to grow from $93 billion in 2016 to over $231 billion by 2021. North America is leading this growth due to the demand for smart devices and mobile apps that are integrating themselves into every aspect of our lives. Whether through a text message from your banking app that your credit card may have a fraudulent charge or using an IoT device, such as Amazon’s Alexa, to call a ride to the airport, APIs are giving every industry the ability to rapidly scale with fewer resources than ever before.
Automation is changing the telecommunications industry in a variety of ways, some visible to the public and others only visible to those with a deep knowledge of how telephony resources work. What used to take weeks to be processed through a carrier can now be done instantly through customer facing portals. This is enabling telecom experts and enterprise developers to build custom communications solutions at a rapid pace.
For those who manage unified communications platforms or run their own virtual PBX the need for automation is even greater. Communications APIs are giving businesses of all size direct access to telephony resources that until recently have been cumbersome to work with. By making simple processes and tasks automated, the managers of these platforms have the ability to eliminate time-consuming questions and issues to focus their expertise on solving the larger, more strategic problems facing their clients and their own business.
How exactly can Communications APIs enable new levels of automation and customer satisfaction? We have a few ideas from the experts:
- Is porting phone numbers a pain for your business? If you have an excel sheet full of phone numbers and port dates then your problem is only going to grow with your business. Finding a provider or carrier who is knowledgeable about porting and has strong relationships with other carriers is an important step to eliminating the pain of this issue. To fully automate this process you can build porting capabilities into your site through a Porting API, which exposes submission information, status, and carrier communication to provider communications to your customers, keeping them in the loop throughout the entire porting process.
- Do you only hear about call quality issues when a customer is leaving? Call quality is a common issue that impacts customers but rarely gets reported and can lead to a loss of business. Building call quality reporting capabilities into your services takes only a few lines of code and can help you to proactively fix any issues. Customers can report how you are doing automatically, whether it is through an automatic SMS sent periodically after a call or a number combination that allows them to report their call quality while still on the line, this process can save you time and improve your customer’s experience in a very tangible way.
- How do you eliminate common process questions? Finding ways to automate the answers to simple customer questions will save both you and your customers time and money. By implementing a Phone Number API into your customer-facing capabilities you can eliminate the back and forth about simple number requests. An API for phone number management should also give you the ability to select primary and failover routes for your numbers, allowing customers to seamlessly purchase, route and start using new numbers. Your customers can grow as rapidly as they want and you can jump into the conversation if there are special requests, rather than facilitate the conversation.
By migrating capabilities to a self-service model you provide your customers with a higher level of control over their own calling and messaging services. This model also relieves the burden of managing all aspects of every account from your team. The best way to open up capabilities to your customers is through APIs. Look for a provider who offers API’s with tools that mirror those in their online management site to maximize their effectiveness and takes a full stack approach, to ensure you can code in your preferred language.
Want to discuss how you can add automation to your current business model? Chat with our experts!
