Creating a more automated, end-to-end, digital customer experience for enterprises is an attractive prize. The big question is how to design and build them relatively simply, quickly and cost effectively.
BT digitizes B2B customer experience with Open APIs
Creating a more automated, end-to-end, digital customer experience for enterprises is an attractive prize. After all, success means B2B customers get a simpler, faster and more flexible way to view, order, use and pay for services, while communications service providers (CSPs) lower their running costs and gather rich customer data that can drive new sales. The big question is how to design and build new, durable B2B customer-facing systems relatively simply, quickly and cost effectively – especially when providing complex service bundles to multinationals in up to 111 countries, as is the case for BT. Amit Sharma, Head of Engineering, BT, and John Gustavsson, Program Architect Director, Salesforce, discussed the challenges and benefits of creating a new end-to-end, digital B2B customer experience during a recent TM Forum Global Architecture Forum webinar.
BT is partnering with Salesforce to transform customer experience using the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture and Open APIs. BT aims to offer enterprise customers the ease-of-use of B2C online systems, while lowering total cost of ownership and speeding up product launches, explains Sharma. Among the ways the CSP is setting out to reduce costs, for example, is the development of a cloud native system that is scalable on demand. Both Sharma and Gustavsson emphasize the benefits of focusing on features for customers when choosing APIs and taking an Agile and iterative approach to API implementation.
“The most important factor of digital transformation is to put the customer at [its] heart,” says Sharma. “Before you jump on Open APIs, define use cases …and find out which APIs support them.”
Watch the webinar to learn more about how BT and Salesforce are using Open APIs to overcome the integration challenges that slow down digital transformation in a multi-vendor environment.