Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are changing the way companies do business. They make IT systems more responsive and adaptable, streamlining how companies interact with their customers to deliver more immediate and personalised experiences. According to Forrester, companies are expected to spend $3 billion on API management by 2020.
For a view into how APIs work in practice, we spoke to Tony Martino, CEO of Tollring, about how his customers are using and benefiting from APIs.
iCall Suite Analytics
Tollring specialises in analytics that gives businesses greater insight into how calls and customer interactions are being managed and delivered at a company, branch or individual level. A few years back, APIs became a major focus for Tollring when its partners and end users started asking the company to overlay additional data into its iCall Suite analytics software.
As Tony explains, “We decided to turn the situation on its head. Rather than add data into our products, we developed APIs that allow our customers to extract the data from our systems."
"The APIs deliver a really clean way for customers to access our information which they can then embed into their other data platforms to achieve a more holistic view of their world of information”
Tollring has created APIs across its complete portfolio of products. There are now key metrics that can be drawn from an analytics perspective, a call recording perspective and even a fraud management perspective. This means that end customers, resellers and service providers have much more flexibility in how they use the software, and how they get value from it.
Service Provider Flexibility
For service providers, Tollring is using APIs to overcome two key challenges – helping to streamline the provisioning of its products and the billing for those services.
“Service providers need to on-board customers taking our products as easily and seamlessly as possible within their own portals,” says Tony. “What they don’t want is a second provisioning portal from us. We therefore built an extensive list of APIs around licensing so customers wishing to purchase a product can simply tick a box and we unlock the various elements within the licensing engine. This includes all the messaging around the provisioning piece such as emails and passwords, all via the providers’ single process.”
A robust billing capability was the second requirement, allowing partners to incorporate Tollring’s licensing costs within their own tariffing and billing processes. Again, APIs are used for this as well.
Tony reports that his service provider partners have since taken this a step further and are using Tollring’s analytics to understand levels of usage across their own licensing products, not just those provided by Tollring.
“The APIs have been extended to draw additional KPI data about all the licenses that customers are consuming. Within our premier products, we can see how many call centre agents a customer has purchased. The knock-on effect is that the service provider can now see all the additional features they are delivering to that end customer around the call centre agent.”
