Got a customer service team that is overwhelmed by the endless barrage of business enquiries? You’re not alone. It is estimated that 74% of call center staff are at risk of burnout, and we understand why.
While customer service desks were once confined to storefronts with limited capacity, digital-first transformation (particularly over the last three years) has opened the floodgates for customers to make requests from wherever they may be—whether they’re sitting at home on the couch, in between meetings at work, or even while travelling across the globe.
While 61% of customer care leaders report a growth in calls, only 10% of digital customer care platforms have been fully scaled and adopted by customers.
This means that all customer service teams now have the challenge of providing personalised service while still keeping up with the growing volume of enquiries. Thankfully, digital transformation has brought about a convenient solution to this conundrum in the form of CPaaS.
Hosted on the cloud, CPaaS solutions allows companies to build a customised stack by picking and choosing from various communication APIs, including chat apps, voice, video, and messaging. But not all communication APIs providers are made equal.
Providers can vary significantly in terms of their ability to offer flexibility, scalability, ease of use, reach, and security—factors which can significantly affect how much downtime your customer service team experiences, as well as your team’s ability to deliver quality customer care. Make sure you know what to look out for in a communication APIs partner before embarking on your digital transformation journey. Here are four sets of evaluation criteria that we recommend exploring before making a decision:
Communication APIs Partner Criteria #1: A flexible and scalable range of channels to reach different audiences in different markets
The baseline requirement when choosing between communication APIs providers is this: Do they offer communication channels that are popular amongst your target audience? If they don’t, then move on.
This is especially true for demographics that heavily favour one communication channel over the rest. For example, 96.7% of South Koreans use KakaoTalk compared to just 14.8% who use Facebook Messenger. Zalo also holds a similar level of dominance in the Vietnamese market.
Your communication API provider should also offer tools that align with your customers’ behaviour and pain points. Voice APIs and SMS APIs are just some of the ways to increase customer service accessibility to the visually impaired and rural communities, respectively.
Once you’ve zeroed in on communication APIs providers who can grant you access to your primary channels, you’ll want to cast your channel wider to build an omnichannel strategy. However, expanding without the right technology or workforce to back it up can lead to gaps in conversations that muddy the customer experience. Consolidated customer service portals help keep your quality customer experience intact by allowing you to manage incoming conversations from multiple platforms. That way, you never have to spend time backtracking to figure out exactly what your customers want.
Communication APIs Partner Criteria #2: Ease of use and implementation
The next question: will my team be able to use this communication software? Communication platforms should have intuitive interfaces that allow customer service professionals to navigate to where they need to be so that they can focus on what they do best—providing personalised service.
This is where API-centric CPaaS solutions come in handy. Choosing communication APIs solutions that are compatible with leading CRM systems, such as Zendesk and Salesforce can help you bypass the tedious process of building an entirely new platform from scratch, as well as the significant downtime that can be involved.
Keep in mind, your target audience and customer behaviour are always subject to change, especially in the present economic climate. Rather than restricting yourself with fixed channels and features that might become redundant, look for a communication APIs provider that makes it easy for you to pivot at the drop of a hat, adding or removing APIs as needed. Plus, if these changes can be made easily without resorting to complicated code manipulation, even better.
Communication APIs Partner Criteria #3: Airtight cybersecurity for customer data privacy and compliance
Ultimately, what’s most important in looking for a communication APIs partner is having a good cybersecurity posture. Communicating with customers across multiple channels means increasing the number of nodes from which hackers can conduct their cyberattacks. When cybercriminals can penetrate 93% of company networks, you definitely don’t want to take your chances.
Cybersecurity threats are always evolving, as hackers come up with novel ways to infiltrate a company’s defences. This means that your CPaaS system will need constant updates to stand a chance against the new threats that will inevitably arise.
Choosing a communication APIs partner who owns their technology stack will ensure that your communication platform receives cybersecurity updates in a timely manner, without having to wait on patches from third-party technology providers.
Global companies that operate across multiple territorial jurisdictions need to be doubly vigilant. Because the customer data laws vary significantly between countries, it is important to make sure that whatever communication APIs platform you use fulfils the compliance requirements of all your target regions.
Communication APIs Partner Criteria #4: A CPaaS provider that supports you like how you support your customers
Next, find out if your communication APIs provider is likely to support you the same way you want to support your customers. The long and the short of it is that your future communication APIs partner should enable you to fend off the problems of scalability, implementation, cybersecurity, and more so that you can be there for your customers 99.999% of the time.
It’s not just flexible, code-light solutions that make this possible, but around-the-clock support from technical staff, with local expertise that make troubleshooting easy no matter where you’re operating in the world.
Curious to see if 8×8 ticks all the right boxes in an ideal communication APIs partner? Find out more here – you’ll definitely want to swipe right to a partnership with us.
