In today’s tech-savvy business world, APIs are becoming increasingly popular. Top companies like Twilio, Stripe, and Salesforce have realized how useful APIs can be for their customers, allowing them to connect to many other business apps. But for companies interested in business text messaging, a relatively new technology, it can be difficult to figure out what exactly to look for in an SMS API.
Any serious SaaS app—including a business SMS app—will have an API. Before reviewing any other qualities of a potential business SMS platform, this is one of the most important factors to check off your list. Additionally, your SMS provider API should have certain features so that it can effectively share data with other apps.
Read on to learn about the 3 key features of every API, from contact sync capabilities to webhooks.
Contact Sync Capabilities
Your SMS provider API absolutely must have contact synchronization capabilities.
Contact synchronization capabilities just mean that the business SMS API must be able to create, read, update, and delete information. This capability is commonly referred to as CRUD. In the case of business SMS, text messaging APIs must be able to create, read, update, and delete contacts.
This is especially useful when you consider integrations between your SaaS apps and your business SMS platform. With contact synchronization capabilities, your business will be able to capitalize on one of the biggest benefits of app integrations: securely leveraging customer data between apps.
CRUD ensures that your business can reuse created contacts, leveraging your existing data store and gaining a real-time, accurate view of each customer contact. Contact synchronization also enables your business to have a single source of truth (e.g., your CRM) for contacts. When contact changes are bidirectionally updated, your business has one less data source to worry about.
Trigger/Action Capabilities
The API you choose must be able to react to triggers from other apps and induce triggers within itself. These capabilities are critical for automations, which can help streamline a business’s text messaging services and team workflows exponentially.
For example, your business SMS API must be able to recognize the trigger for a customer-placed order within a separate app, then start the trigger within its own system to send an order notification text to that customer.
With trigger/action capabilities, your company can create a streamlined business app ecosystem that interacts seamlessly, bringing the speed and convenience of SMS to traditional, slow business workflows.
Webhooks
Finally, your business SMS API must be able to provide webhooks. Webhooks provide the ability to monitor apps for new events—like incoming customer messages.
With business SMS APIs, webhooks empower your other SaaS apps to monitor customer chats and wait for a new message or specific keyword within a text. Once the other SaaS app identifies the appropriate trigger, it can induce an action within its own system.
For example, if the word “problem” suddenly appears in a VIP customer chat, a webhook empowers a business text messaging platform to automatically change that customer’s custom field in a customer support app like Zendesk. In that case, the custom field might change to “urgent” or “attention required,” so customer service agents know to focus on it.
Webhooks are yet another way that business text messaging can help your company create a business app ecosystem that interacts seamlessly.
Looking for a business SMS provider API that meets these qualifications? Check out ours.
