APIs have played a significant role in helping businesses meet the increasing demand from customers for connected experiences. They have also helped businesses pursue even bigger, more profound business evolutions like creating online marketplaces, unlocking new revenue streams and product categories, as well as executing platform business model
APIs are fast becoming more valuable to the customer experience as the easiest and quickest way for businesses to target specific moments in the customer journey, adding regular updates to the customer experience. Within the past decade, API use cases have evolved alongside the escalation of connected experiences that span mobile devices.
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The growing variety and number of customer touch points have made the customer journey complex, needing businesses to act on data from multiple customer interactions, numerous channels to deliver a seamless customer experience. To meet this demand, companies are shifting away from building discrete applications to creating securely connected experiences that require a series of APIs orchestrated for the optimal customer experience.
Be it legacy applications coded years ago or a collection of APIs; both depend on technologies that were not intended to interact. APIs act as an interface layer that extracts underlying complexity and enables disparate software to connect. But an API is not just a connector; it also serves as the basis of brand differentiation – engaging with a voice platform for self-service customer support, authenticating a user and protecting their password, or receiving a delivery notification in real-time. APIs now have become a crucial engine of business growth.
The Power of APIs
With access to data and functions via APIs, businesses are empowered to make smarter decisions, drive innovation, improve customer satisfaction, and identify new areas of business. Most businesses find APIs to be the largest promoter of digital transformation strategies. There are multiple benefits of using APIs – enabling new digital products, reducing time to market, enhancing customer experiences, opening new partner opportunities, and preparing for the future.
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To fully reap the benefits of all that APIs have to offer, a company’s API strategy needs to reflect the critical business drivers and goals upon which they are focusing in the market today.
Developing a Robust API Program
Even though APIs are crucial, many companies still struggle. It’s not enough to simply start using APIs – companies that establish an exhaustive API strategy, whether the APIs are being used internally or externally, are the most successful.
Companies need to plan their API strategy like it’s a new business. It includes – aligning to the business goals, measuring performance, identifying supporting technology, and engaging the ecosystem.
Aligning the API program and the business goals is crucial, so is pinning down the appropriate use of technology and supporting architectures. KPIs can help measure the success of the API program and ensure it is meeting the business goals. Moreover, engaging the ecosystem is essential, whether this is for internal API developers or external API consumers. It is vital to know and understand the audience, what capabilities they need, how to support them, and how to build an effective communication plan for the program.
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