The importance of communication APIs in the financial services industry

APIs are the driving force behind current digital communications. They consistently link and facilitate data exchange between applications and web servers to provide on-demand information in real-time. Communication APIs are embedded on top of pre-existing contact center or unified communications platforms. This helps them deliver new automation functionalities within your financial institution’s current environments without disrupting existing infrastructure. They also allow institutions to integrate customer service automation features like real-time voice, messaging, chat, and more to their existing systems like CRMs while ensuring security and protecting against fraud and cyber-attacks.

How communication APIs help in the financial services industry

APIs may be of value to your financial institution in different ways. They include:

Fraud and risk reduction

• Account validation: Confirm customer accounts using SMS, email, or voice recognition. This helps banks and other financial institutions eliminate the risk of fraud.
• Protecting bank contact information: Notify customers of potential fraud promptly.
• Identification of payers and payees: Deliver a standardized model that allows both parties in payment systems to validate the identity of payers or payees, helping to minimize fraud.

Data sharing

• Obtaining account balances: Give customers the ability to request information about their account balances and history.
• Appointment scheduling and reminders: Offer self-service appointment scheduling as well as appointment reminders, using data from CRM integrations. This also decreases cancellation rates.

Payment processing

• Self-service bill management: Increase the rate of on-time bill payment and revenue through reminders, scheduling, and self-service payment functionality.
• Identity and fraud protection: Maintain security with PCI-compliant processing, keeping personal contact and credit card information safe.
• Alternative payment channels: Expand payment options from web to voice, delivering additional functionality and a failover payment option in the event of a web outage.

Collect customer feedback and ensure satisfaction

• Visibility into the customer experience: Increase internal awareness with surveys after every customer interaction.
• Leverage analytics and reporting: Utilize analytics collected from calls and surveys to improve operations and customer satisfaction.
• Marketing: Improve the ability to collect crucial customer information to understand customer preferences better market to their needs.

Bottomline

Communication APIs are cloud-based, allowing your business to quickly add customer service automation features to your current platforms. When consumer demands change, institutions can create, modify, and deploy customer communications across channels, from anywhere at any time. They can also rapidly deploy solutions in a matter of minutes and scale them up as needed, to support millions of customer interactions. As a result, institutions can significantly improve customer satisfaction by fully optimizing their online and offline experience.

Where IntelePeer comes in

If you are looking to optimize your customer experiences, IntelePeer will help you through the entire process. Contact us now.