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Application programming interfaces (APIs) have stirred up a paradigm shift within many organisations, enabling the integration of their core, yet diverse, IT systems, building collaborative and self-service business environments, and deriving new revenue sources from both existing and new IT infrastructure. APIs are an essential component of merging the legacy and the new IT platforms, capturing vast amounts of data and ultimately achieving an enterprise’s digital transformation strategy. The potential of APIs to deliver business advantage - and delightful customer experiences even while doing so - simply cannot be undermined.

IDC predicted that by the end of 2017, two-thirds of the global 2000 enterprise CEOs will have digital transformation as their corporate strategy. Digital transformation dominates boardroom discussions as businesses increasingly realise the cost efficiencies and the return on investment impact that digitalisation can offer.

APIs are everywhere – whether posting on Facebook, buying something online from Amazon, watching your favourite show on Netflix, transacting on your bank account, or even watching YouTube. For businesses, APIs have simplified engagement with customers, while at the same time providing them with instant, valuable data insights into their business.

In short, APIs have enabled, no, completely transformed our daily lives.

Delightful customer experiences don’t just happen in a finger-snap. Delivering such an experience is a data driven, meticulously planned, imaginatively designed and mindfully delivered exercise. This approach to delivering a delightful customer experience is important. Why? Because there cannot be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to a delightful customer experience. There’s a reason that the key experiences businesses deliver are almost impossible for any competitor to copy – because the experiences are unique to the business, the business strategy, the brand and the intimate knowledge of the business’ customers.

Customer delight occurs when a business delivers to its customers a strong, positive experience that exceeds the customers’ expectations. The favourable emotional response of delighted customers will lead to repeat buying, brand loyalty and word-of-mouth referrals. In the long run, it will result in a definitive business advantage and spear-head growth.

Successful digital transformation requires a data strategy that brings together disparate enterprise data – structured, unstructured and semi-structured – to deliver insights and drive business outcomes.

More and more of the world’s information has moved online and has become digitized. Coupled with a multitude of multi-channel transactions, digital information has resulted in a data deluge. According to Gartner, about 80% of data held by an organization is unstructured data, comprised of information from customer phone calls, emails and social media feeds. This is in addition to the voluminous diagnostic information logged by embedded and user devices. While it would be daunting to even make a proper analysis from organized data, it is all the more difficult to make sense of semi-structured and unstructured data. Organizations have to study structured, semi-structured and unstructured data sets to arrive at meaningful business decisions, including determining customer behaviour and personalizing their service offerings for their customers’ delightful experiences.

Managing data from disparate data sources can be extremely challenging. One needs to think of how customer experiences can be changed from ‘satisfactory’ to ‘delightful’. A thought process needs to start to decide the technology stack for data ingestion and storage. Bringing the 360º view from disparate sources of data and managing the data operations are key to craft delightful experiences in the journey with your customer.