One of the many benefits that cloud-based enterprise applications offer businesses today is the relative ease of integration between critical systems that must share information. One of the greatest nightmares of premise-based systems has been getting these systems to work together. Today, system administrators use something called cloud application programming interfaces (cloud APIs) to ensure cross-cloud compatibility and integrate applications.

These cloud APIs might be used, for example, to ensure that the company’s cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) application is integrated with the cloud contact center platform a company uses, so that customer support personal can have access to the CRM database through the contact center system, ensuring that they have the customer’s history with the company at their fingertips before they begin a support session. The same goes for a cloud-based billing, shipping and order system: without easy access to this information from the call center, agents simply couldn’t provide the quality of customer experience that customers expect.

Contact center solutions providers who offer robust cloud APIs can help companies eliminate some of their biggest headaches, and put behind the days of depleting budgets, wasting IT resources, and taking forever just trying to build integrations between solutions. Web services technology enables advanced software integrations with other applications and services, but without the headaches premise-based solutions can bring.

Cloud contact center solutions provider Five9 (News - Alert) prides itself on its robust cloud API offerings, and outlines some of the benefits it can bring to customers of the company’s Virtual Contact Center (VCC) Platform.

“Want to migrate to the Five9 Cloud Contact Center, but your agents love their proprietary customer relationship management (CRM) application customized just like they want it? Bring it with you,” says the company on its Web site. “Do your agents need to connect to your billing or order entry systems to respond instantly to customer service requests? No problem.”

Today, the goal is business agility, and easy integration between applications is the underlying tool to achieve this. Cloud APIs such as those offered by Five9 are a way to facilitate a direct connection between the contact center and a company’s critical enterprise systems. This way, companies can ensure they are providing customers with the best and fastest possible service, the most up-to-date information and – most importantly – a reason to return again and again.