Building a successful contact center is like building a home. You wouldn’t expect a contractor who has rusty nails to produce a structurally-sound, beautiful home. Similarly, contact center agents who have inefficient or outdated tools can’t build a positive and successful customer experience.
Contact center agents need up-to-date, comprehensive features that will simplify and strengthen their interactions with customers. Customer satisfaction increases when you choose to invest in powerful contact center capabilities.
With the Mitel Contact Center, you can count on advanced APIs to serve as sharp tools for your agents.
What are APIs?
APIs are application programming interfaces. These interfaces connect and integrate two systems. For example, if you use your Google login information to sign into a site that’s not owned by Google, then you are using an API.
With contact center APIs, customers can use their preferred platform to connect with agents, whether that’s through SMS text, web chat, voice calls, video calls, or another platform. The API allows the agents to receive the communication in one central view, which is the omnichannel.
How do APIs Improve Contact Center Operations?
Contact center API solutions integrate into the omnichannel to give agents a single view, which results in a smoother and quicker interaction with the customer, and more effective customer service. This is because APIs integrate with CRMs and other back-office systems to increase agent efficiency and improve the customer experience.
APIs build strong contact centers in several key ways:
APIs Enable Easy Scaling
In today’s world, it’s critical to be able to communicate with customers on their preferred platforms. But if you don’t have your own system for doing that, meeting customers where they are can be a challenge.
APIs provide systems so you don’t have to build them from the ground up. For example, if your customers prefer communicating via SMS text or even via WhatsApp, an API can give your agents that capability. With the right APIs, you don’t have to build your own software to communicate with your customers via their preferred method.
APIs Empower Automation
Customers get frustrated when they spend time sitting on hold to reach an agent, especially when all they need is to ask a basic question. Agents also dislike spending time answering these simple questions when many calls are waiting in their queue.
Automation can solve this problem, but automation can’t happen without APIs.
For example, when a customer fills out a form, an API can automatically put that data into your CRM. A connected API automatically puts that customer record into an appropriate agent’s outgoing call queue.
Automation decreases frustrating wait times and increases productivity, and it’s made possible by powerful APIs.
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APIs Collect Data Across Platforms
APIs can collect more than just the data customers share via a form or web chat. They can also collect data from different sources, such as the customer’s behavior on your website and their interactions with your social media platforms.
APIs collect and analyze this data all in one place. Agents can quickly access this information, which makes it easier for them to answer customer questions. This also allows your agents to follow your business model for customer interactions at each stage of the sales cycle.
Mitel Contact Center APIs
One of the most popular and expansive providers of contact center software is Mitel. The Mitel Contact Center (MiCC) infrastructure features a functional call model, control services, switching function services, status reporting services, and more. The MiCC offers an extensive suite of APIs.
Mitel’s infrastructure allows APIs to share resources and data. These APIs offer easy switching between platforms and virtual devices. With the MiCC, agents can switch from a voice call to a video call and use screen sharing to illustrate to a customer how to better resolve a problem. This is just one of the many functionalities baked into the MiCC that empower agents to increase customer satisfaction.
Better Systems Create Better Customer Experiences
Ineffective manual processes slow down agents and irritate customers. With powerful contact center APIs, agents can provide improved, on-target customer experience.
Equip your team with the best tools. MiCC uses extensive APIs in its contact center solutions to provide effective integrations. Our team at BSB Communications can help you build an API strategy and roll it out effectively. We can support you by setting up your team with one of the best contact center solutions in the industry: Mitel Contact Center.