Vonage, a global leader in business cloud communications, has announced the launch of its Conversation API at the Company’s user and developer conference, Vonage Campus. As the newest addition to the Vonage API Platform, the Conversation API enables developers and enterprises to create customised, real-time conversations that maintain context across multiple channels, including messaging and voice.

“Brands are increasingly competing on customer experience and those that resonate the most with today’s customer are those that meet them where they are and where they feel the most comfortable – whether that’s messaging, voice, video or social”

With so many different communications channels, applications and devices available in today’s hyper-connected and digital world, brands struggle to keep their interactions with customers contextual, personalised and meaningful. By creating superior customer journeys through conversations, the Conversation API helps brands to streamline these interactions. Retaining context of interactions by connecting various communications channels, even custom or homegrown applications, at every customer touchpoint, Vonage’s Conversation API empowers businesses to seamlessly follow the customer through their preferred mode of communication. From authentication via SMS to customer support via messaging, voice or video – all context is retained, all in a single thread.

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Businesses are realising that moving towards a conversational model is a more natural form of communicating with their customers. Providers today are moving toward a conversation model to address the shift in consumer behavior in recent years that has been largely driven by the proliferation of social channels, as well as smartphone penetration, the availability of low cost/high-speed bandwidth and the rapid advancement of practical AI. This focus on the power of conversation is enabling new and exciting commercial models, including Cognitive Commerce and Conversational Commerce.

“Brands are increasingly competing on customer experience and those that resonate the most with today’s customer are those that meet them where they are and where they feel the most comfortable – whether that’s messaging, voice, video or social,” said Roland Selmer, VP of Product Management for Vonage. “The addition of Conversation API to our already extensive portfolio of APIs empowers brands to bring customer interactions together on one platform, seamlessly moving with the customer across channels, keeping track of every conversation without losing the context of the interaction – and helping them to differentiate their business in a competitive marketplace.”

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Understanding conversation context and history of these customer interactions enables businesses to act on it, helping to create better engagement and more meaningful connections that drive an unforgettable customer experience and deeper relationships. Adding action items or events to these interactions also helps to personalise the customer journey. Whether that’s highlighting when an appointment was made, logging what pizza toppings were ordered via voice transcription or sending SMS alerts when a package was delivered, these interactions are available to businesses all in one thread, enabling them to add context and meaning to each and every touchpoint. This ability to connect disparate applications gives brands the tools they need to power uninterrupted, contextual, real-time conversations that deliver a truly unique customer journey.

“The Vonage Conversation API is a timely and important product that will help enterprises simplify and enable innovative digital interactions with their customers,” according to Courtney Munroe, GVP for Telecom and CPaaS research at IDC. “The Vonage Conversation API will take the complexity out of contextual omnichannel communications, while enabling a personalised and streamlined customer engagement process.”

Selmer added, “In addition to enabling developers to quickly implement a multi-channel ready solution to easily reach users on the channel they prefer while preserving that native experience, the Conversation API also eliminates the need to employ multiple vendors and the development time needed to manage them.”

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