Boost Your Apps and Website Experience with a Dose of Digital Communications
Customers are demanding new ways to engage with your brand through digital communications. Contactless engagement, proactive notifications, real time support and increased online account security are just a few examples. Over the next 8 weeks, we’ll provide step-by-step guidance demonstrating how to add video, SMS, chat apps, voice and analytics to your apps and websites in minutes using APIs.
Predict the future by building it on digital communications.
Gartner made a profound statement in their recent CPaaS market guide:
"By 2023, 90% of global enterprises will leverage API-enabled CPaaS offerings as a strategic IT skillset to enhance their digital competitiveness, up from 20% in 2020."
To go from 20% to 90% means 70% of global enterprises are taking action now to enhance their digital competitiveness using CPaaS. If your company isn’t investing in using CPaaS technologies to support new digital business models, deliver new ways of engaging customers through mobile apps and website experiences, and empower employees with the tools they need to efficiently deliver effective outcomes for customers, it will be left behind. Building a solid foundation for your online presence is crucial, and the first step is creating a professional website. Use a drag and drop website builder to highlight your digital identity, and create a place where customers can learn about your business, products, and services. For more complex website needs, you need to decide whether you need Wordpress, Shopify, or Drupal development services.
That may sound dramatic, but the race has already started. Research is showing companies have accelerated digitization of customer interactions by 3-4 years. McKinsey research.
Additional McKinsey research found that “during the last downturn, about 10% of companies fared materially better than the rest.”
A key learning from that research of the last downturn is “build resilience now.” The same principle is true today. Those companies moving quickly to invent the future by building it are going to become leaders in their respective industries.
To further the point that now is the time to innovate, an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review pointed out that bankruptcy filings were up 43%, with more doom and gloom on the horizon. In their research, they found two groups of companies, Mourners and Stormers. The Stormers, successful companies, are actually accelerating their rate of innovation and delivering outsized results.
Underpinning any company’s ability to move forward successfully is an open communications platform that makes communication-based interactions a natural and seamless part of the core workflows for your business. It’s not enough to have phones, contact centers and chat capabilities. Customers expect both a unified experience and convenience, meaning every interaction uses the appropriate communication channel and is proactive, fast and easy.
Over the next 8 weeks, we’ll provide step-by-step guides demonstrating how to:
- Embed a fully capable, ready to go video meeting service
- Increase app and website security using SMS and two factor authentication
- Keep customers proactively updated using automated SMS notifications
- Accelerate customer support outcomes using Chat Apps
- Enhance data privacy for in-app phone calls using number masking
- Receive real-time audio and video meeting analytics that reinvent IT’s ability to ensure higher levels of call and meeting quality
Here’s a preview of what’s to come over the next eight weeks.
Programmable Video
Gone are the days of painful phone calls and emailed screenshots. 8x8 Jitsi as a Service enables instant HD video meetings to be embedded in applications and websites in minutes.
Easy to deploy using high level APIs.
Avoid building from scratch; just pick up the code and go. The low code approach running on 8x8’s highly scalable and highly available global infrastructure eliminates the need to invest time in building with low level APIs or DevOps resourcing to manage infrastructure.
Simple billing.
No more billing surprises at the end of the month. Based on monthly active users, you know exactly what your costs are and only pay for what you need. And, your developers get a free sandbox with up to 25 users and unlimited usage to keep the innovation flowing.
Community assurance.
This code has been hardened with over a million downloads globally. It’s used in applications including banking video conferencing, education platforms, and home security applications with participation from an established community of developers that share ideas, tips and tricks.
Make it yours.
Add or remove features, put your branding in it, and embed it into your applications and websites. Why? Building a solid foundation for your online presence is crucial, and the first step is creating a professional website. There are lots of tools you can use for this - such as a drag and drop website builder - to highlight your digital identity, and create a place where customers can learn about your business, products, and services.
SMS
With a 98% open-rate in less than 3 minutes, this is the most reliable and trusted communication source available. There’s no better way to keep your customers informed through proactive notifications. Additionally, it adds a level of security with mobile number verification and one time pins.
You can get started immediately, no integration required. Just log into the online portal and start communicating with your customers.
- SMS messaging is the most trusted communication source available. With a 98% open rate, there’s no better way to keep your customers informed.
- Keep customers in the loop: automate event-based messages to make sure customers are informed every step of the way.
- Enhance security using mobile number verification, two-factor authentication codes and one-time pins (OTP).
- Scale as needed: with no limits, you can instantly send thousands — or even millions — of messages.
- Get started immediately - no integration required. Just log into the online portal and start communicating with your customers.
Give it a test drive - Tutorial
Chat Apps
A chat app is worth 1,000 words with the ability to share rich content like photos, videos, screenshots, PDFs, location tags, or files. Look for solutions that can handle more than one chat app. For example, the 8x8 Chat Apps API lets you manage WhatsApp, Viber, Kakaotalk, WeChat, LINE, Zalo and Facebook Messenger. No matter which chat app your customers use, a single API works for all of them.
- Directly share rich content like photos, videos, screenshots, PDFs, location tags, or files. Moreover, when sharing photos, consider enhancing their quality by using techniques such as photo object removal for a more polished and visually appealing presentation.
- Achieve superior deliverability - read receipts let you know which notifications are getting opened and Smart Retry reroutes undelivered messages to another chat app to ensure delivery - so your customers don’t miss an important message, and you know what messages resonate.
- Integrate with your customer support environments:
- Zendesk Support - Already using Zendesk? Our APIs seamlessly integrate multiple chat apps into your existing Zendesk ticketing system to streamline customer communications.
- Salesforce Live Agent - It’s easy to add 2-way chat app conversations with leads and customers to Salesforce. Here’s a short video demonstrating the experience in Salesforce.
- Freshdesk - Give your customers more options to reach out by quickly and simply integrating their favorite chat apps with your existing Freshdesk support system.
Voice API
This API provides number masking, text-to-speech messaging and app-to-app calling capabilities.
Number Masking
With increasing privacy regulations, it’s more important than ever to keep customer information private. The 8x8 Voice API features a phone number masking function that keeps numbers anonymous and your business in compliance with privacy policies and regulations.
- Meet regulatory requirements to keep customers personal data safe.
- Prevent fraud and revenue leaks by removing personal phone numbers from the application, preventing riders and drivers from communicating and agreeing on trip or payment details off-platform.
- Enable 2-factor verification via SMS when new users sign up.
- This short video explains how number masking works.
Voice Messaging
Our text-to-speech software turns your text into a voice call, improving the odds that passwords, notifications, alerts, and other sensitive data will be received.
- No call length limit
- Choice of voices and pre-recordings
- Reach landlines, improving answer rates
App-to-App Calling
Personalize the experience for your users by enabling in-app calls over VOIP. All app-to-app calls go through an IP network giving you total control over the way the call is presented.
- Built-in phone number masking
- Embed directly into your app code
- Provide names and pictures instead of area codes
- Easier to provide recordings (when needed)
- Use data instead of consuming customers’ mobile minutes
Callstats for real-time analytics
91% of customers say poor audio quality would negatively impact their perception of your company. What call quality reporting do you have in place?
Callstats is a performance monitoring solution that helps contact center and IT managers provide their users with the best possible interaction quality. Callstats monitors, analyses, and sends proactive alerts from any WebRTC session providing users with the root cause of call or video quality issues helping to drastically reduce the troubleshooting and resolution time.
- Monitors call quality in real-time to isolate problems for WebRTC applications.
- Deliver insights that drive application adoption through AI-driven monitoring and analytics.
- Analyze large volumes of WebRTC communications data automatically reducing the time IT staff spend manually identifying issues.
- Reduce downtime with proactive call quality score notifications.
Give it a try with a free account
Start with one or use them all to reach your customers wherever they may be. Over the next several weeks we’ll provide you with a series of guides on how to use each of these capabilities with your apps and websites.
Build your experience with 8x8.
