Enterprise Connect 2019: The New Role of the Developer in the Contact Center

Enterprise Connect, Vonage VP of Product Management Bryan Stokes joined a panel discussion moderated by Sheila McGee-Smith Founder, Principal Analyst, McGee-Smith Analytics. The session focused on how programmable communications is changing the contact center market and how the role of the developer is being elevated, helping to drive customer experience innovation.

With the increasing availability of open APIs, developers have become a key part of the equation to allow companies to customize the contact center. And what they’re finding is that Application and Programmability capabilities are not an either/or equation anymore. Businesses today do not need to build everything from scratch to create a solution tailored to their needs.

"The mid-market to enterprise business that is just moving to the cloud is not going to build everything from the ground up," said Stokes. "They’ll take an extensible, flexible contact center solution and layer on programmability to build the 5-10 % that matters to them, to ultimately deliver a better customer experience."

With today’s programmability tools, developers are able to leverage APIs to do what has previously required time-consuming and expensive vendor professional services. With a cloud-based contact center, building what will differentiate them in the market on top of the application brings additional contextual information to the agent, helping them to improve productivity as well as the overall customer experience. The key is finding what unique differentiating needs they have and crafting that small part of the solution to deliver an optimal and differentiated customer journey.