Creating a connected customer experience with APIs

We are in the age of digital transformation. For many organizations, that means not only integrating technology systems, but also reshaping a company’s technology stack and data sources to be focused on and around customer needs.  

As a customer engages with your brand, each channel and touchpoint they interact with has the potential to create a new data silo, which are disparate centers of data housed by one group in an organization that is not fully accessible by another. These disconnected data silos – coming from sources such as Call Centers, CRM systems, or in-store point-of-sales systems – are one of the most common barriers to gaining a true 360-degree view of your customers, and a continuous challenge for 90% of organizations.  

Developing connected experiences relies on an exceptionally designed, personalized, end-to-end customer experience. This type of experience can be activated via a CDP (customer data platform) that serves as the catalyst for a customer data-enabled integrated tech stack that seamlessly captures customer data (from things like digital behavioral interactions to self-selected preferences and past purchase history) as a customer engages with a brand’s website, e-commerce destination, in-store/POS, account portals, apps and more. 

Having your data effectively integrated is at the core of your customer experience. Today, companies can no longer afford to not provide a connected and seamless customer experience. According to MuleSoft’s 2022 Connectivity Benchmark Report, organizations could lose on average $7M if they fail to complete these digital transformation initiatives.  

So, how do organizations create an agile and seamless customer experience? The solution – APIs.  

An API (application programming interface) is a software intermediary that allows two applications to communicate with each other, creating a flow of data like a two-way street. According to MuleSoft’s API’s Essentials Blueprint, “APIs are the digital building blocks that compose and orchestrate customer experiences, foster new partnerships, and drive revenue with business models.” 

MuleSoft is leading the way in data integration software, and empowering organizations to integrate their data at scale to create connected customer experiences. According to their 2022 Connectivity Benchmark Report, APIs are helping organizations deliver more value by:  

• Increasing productivity  
• Unlocking major revenue growth opportunities
• Delivering better employee and customer experiences  

In addition, with MuleSoft’s Salesforce CDP Connector, users can integrate their data with Salesforce CDP endpoints, automate data ingestion from third parties, query the CDP Data Lake, and get the full 360-view of their customers within their CDP instance.  

At Horizontal, we believe that brands and companies are only as good as their worst customer experience. We partner with the world’s Fortune 500 companies in solving complex customer data challenges to drive business outcomes. Want to learn more about how to integrate your data to begin your digital transformation? Let’s talk.