What is an API and how can it improve my customer journey?

Across news channels, it’s becoming increasingly clear that SaaS (Software as a Service) is driving and reshaping businesses and government organization IT strategies. With this new reality, it’s more important than ever to enable technologies to communicate with one another in a streamlined and secure digital ecosystem.

This shift gives most companies two main options – either migrate their entire data ecosystem to a cloud MSP or find a way to harmonize their own software and third party integrations within existing infrastructure. This is where APIs begin to play a really important role.

What is An API?

API stands for Application Program Interface. Essentially, an API is a library of tools, routines, and protocols. Developers use it when writing code to assign how software applications should interact. In layman’s terms – it defines how programs communicate with one another in the ecosystem.

Despite the fact that the high tech marketplace is notably innovative and competitive, software development is an inherently collaborative environment. APIs support integrations that enrich solutions, evolve platforms, and enable companies to tailor solutions to address unique challenges and opportunities. With them, developers can connect proprietary and third party resources to create a higher level of value.

APIs in the Customer Journey Ecosystem

A well-constructed customer journey is a smooth, connected, data-driven set of engagements that drive toward a specific objective. It typically begins online and moves onsite. Each touch point in the journey generates information that becomes the business intelligence that shapes success for the customer, staff members, and operations. Whether the hardware components used throughout the journey are purpose designed to work with the software or they are third party solutions, APIs standardize the connections, making sure they work well within the platform and that they are secure.

Qmatic calls our customer journey management technology ecosystem Orchestra. It is an enterprise-class management platform designed for on-premise and cloud deployment. Within the platform, an incredibly rich set of hardware components, mobile solutions, business intelligence capabilities, and software systems work in harmony to produce complete, successful, data-driven engagements for customers, patients, and citizens and the staff who serve them.

See how the connected Orchestra platform can help you centralize control of your customer journey and raise the quality and impact of CX across your locations.

The best customer journeys are the sum of many parts. With that in mind, Orchestra is powered by built-in and tightly integrated APIs. These APIs facilitate how information is exchanged between systems, devices, and users, creating efficiencies and intelligence without risk to data integrity or security.

These APIs are why Orchestra works as a complete, seamless CX ecosystem. Across the globe, retail, health care, financial, and government agencies use Orchestra to centrally manage the solution and its data, and distribute functionality to operations across the globe to create and support the best possible interactions and experiences for customers and staff.

Whatever your organization needs to accomplish, if you are using software components to achieve the goal, there’s a good chance that APIs are engaged. If you’re not already using these standardized, secure connections to facilitate how your customers, staff, and operations engage and accomplish their goals, you have a great opportunity to make significant improvements quickly and easily.