While automated answering systems, live chat, and text messaging have gained the support of organizations in recent years, many customers still prefer calling and speaking with a live representative. A HubSpot survey found that nearly 7 out of 10 customers like to call a business for customer service.
Maintaining a quality voice communication channel can improve user satisfaction. A phone call API (application programming interface) allows you to easily fulfill user demands for calling capability within a website, app, or software. The right software can also integrate into your company or client’s customer relationship management (CRM) software and business phone systems to enhance its voice communication capabilities, flexibility, and scalability at a low cost.
This blog will explore what a phone call API is and how organizations can leverage one to meet their goals. We will discuss the benefits this APIs benefits and how implementing one can make adding voice communication to a software or system easy.
How Organizations Can Use a Phone Call API
A phone call API can meet many of the demands of an organization or its users. Your company or client is likely seeking a simple way to implement voice communication into its systems or software. Often called a voice API, a phone call API is an easy way to implement voice communication into an app, website, CRM, or phone system at an efficient cost.
Add Calling to an App or Website
One way that many organizations use a phone call API is to integrate calling into their app or website. Companies that rely on an app, such as ride-sharing, dating, or e-commerce service providers, can add a secure voice channel to the mobile app using this API.
The API is a complete solution, allowing the company to provide the voice communication users expect without investing hours into developing the API in-house and building the communication capabilities on-site or through a third party. Organizations that want to protect their users privacy can configure the API to mask both callers’ phone numbers with a phone number masking microservice.
In addition, websites that want to add an easy way for customers to request support or services can use a phone call API to integrate a simple click-to-call feature into their website. Statista found that nearly 60% of website traffic came from mobile devices in the second quarter of 2022, meaning most visitors to an organization’s website will have phone call abilities integrated into their device to take advantage of this convenient feature. While live chat is a popular feature on most websites, a click-to-call button can provide the personalized experience many callers want when contacting a business.
Enhance a CRM With Calling Capabilities
Adding a phone call API to your client or company’s customer relationship management (CRM) software can enhance its effectiveness and create a better experience for both customers and users. Sales and support staff can schedule and make calls, open conference calls, and forward calls from the CRM.
The API allows the organization to receive and manage calls through the CRM to identify calling patterns for quality and training purposes. It also provides the organization with the call detail record (CDR) to identify the caller’s name, number, call length, and date and time of the call for deeper analysis.
Related: Programmable Voice 101 – Learn Everything You Need To Know
Additionally, the phone call API can be integrated into an organization’s calendar to schedule follow-up calls, appointment reminders, and customer satisfaction surveys to drive business. Appointment reminders can be an ideal way to save time and money by reducing no-show clients. For example, an extensive hospital network in Texas found that their no-shows could be reduced by just over 18% in the first four years by decreasing their no-show incidences.
Replace or Improve a PBX with a More Flexible System
In addition to enhancing the CRM, call centers and other organizations can implement a phone call API into their existing phone system to replace or complement their existing private branch exchange (PBX) with a more scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solution.
Organizations can scale their communications up without investing in new hardware or infrastructure using a cloud-based API, then scale back down with no consequences. They can access enterprise-grade features and carrier-grade reliability at a lower cost than through a carrier or a robust on-site PBX.
Developers can instantly add phone numbers and users or port numbers in less time than most carriers through a simple configuration portal. You can also integrate the API into your client or company’s interactive voice response (IVR) and route calls to mobile devices, desk phones, and software-based phones within the company. A cloud-based phone call API provides extensive mobile capabilities, allowing staff to work remotely and operations to continue when the office is closed, or as necessary.
Benefits of a Phone Call API
A phone call API can provide several benefits to your company or client, whether they are seeking to integrate calling into a business phone system or software solution. As we’ve shown, an API is easy to integrate and can save money while increasing the organization’s capacity to receive and make calls. The major benefits of a phone call API include the following:
- Capacity and Scalability: allows your client or company to scale communications with near-unlimited capacity over a cloud-based network. A cloud-based solution can be the fastest and most cost-effective way for startups, small businesses, and medium-sized businesses to scale and meet user demands for reliable voice calling without an expansive on-site PBX.
- Flexibility and Mobility: are extremely flexible, allowing developers to quickly add new calling features to their company or client’s software or systems to meet any needs for clear voice communication. The mobility of the software allows office operations to be moved to remote offices for business continuity and to communicate seamlessly outside of office hours.
- Cost-Efficiency: are more cost-efficient than on-site phone systems. Developers can help an organization scale up without investing in new infrastructure and equipment, adding enterprise-grade features, carrier quality, and reliability to their phone systems without a significant investment. Platforms can charge a monthly flat rate or a more flexible metered (pay-per-minute) rate, allowing the company to scale up and down without financial consequences.
- Automation: Automating features connected to an IVR or automated response can save organizations time and provide support outside office hours. They can automate reminders, surveys, and other calls to increase revenue by reducing no-shows for service sector companies that rely on scheduling clients for appointments.
- Security and Features: can enhance security because a trusted provider maintains the API and cloud-based infrastructure. They also provide your client or company with the latest and most sophisticated features, such as SIP with Microsoft Teams, fraud detection to analyze unusual network traffic, and CNAM caller ID.
- Unified Communications: can be used alongside an SMS/MMS API to unify communications in the cloud and provide various options to users communicating with an organization.
Phone call APIs make it easy to integrate voice calling into a system or software, allowing an organization to take advantage of all the benefits offered.
Implementing a Phone Call API
A communication platform’s premade API can save developers many coding hours compared to developing a phone call API from scratch, while providing more significant benefits. The platform can provide all the features you need for your company or client’s voice services in a production-ready solution. Often, an API takes only a few lines of code to implement, can be configured with microservices, and is ready for use in minutes. After implementing the API, organizations can add phone numbers and users or view CDR information from a simple web configuration portal.
The ideal communications platform will offer developer resources with their API, allowing you to implement the API in the programming language of your choice and seamlessly configure the microservices your client or company needs. Platforms offer resources like software development kits (SDKs), Docker containers for microservices, use case scenarios, and articles to support your implementation in common languages like Python and PHP.
Related: How to Use APIs to Create Customized Business Solutions
A platform that uses representational state transfer (REST) API architecture can simplify implementation. REST APIs are highly compatible with popular programming languages and data formats, including XML and JSON. It is ideal for lightweight communication, using little bandwidth and common HTTP operations.
Select a Communications Platform That Can Deliver Value With a Phone Call API
A phone call API provides valuable calling features to your client or company. It can be quickly, easily, and affordably integrated into an app, CRM, or business phone system, allowing users to make phone calls for support and services and providing the organization with better call management options.
Flowroute offers a phone call API that allows you to easily integrate voice calling with enterprise-grade features like phone number masking and E911 into an organization’s software or systems. The Flowroute HyperNetwork™ provides fast call routing in a range of geographies with 24/7 reliability and 99.999% uptime. Your client or company can scale its calling up or down to meet user demands with our cloud-based infrastructure and metered pricing plan. To see how we can simplify your communication development needs, contact us to get started with Flowroute today.
