TouchCommerce, a provider of customer engagement solutions, has updated its Conversation Platform, specifically focusing on its flexible integration framework and application programming interfaces (APIs). The updates provide further advancements for multistage service interactions across channels, systems, and organizations.
Companies can now add the TouchCommerce live chat experience to any of their native mobile apps or integrate with third-party APIs for reading from and writing to any external service.
The chat integration currently covers text-based chat only, but Marina Kalika, director of product marketing at TouchCommerce, says the company is looking to expand "outside of text to other forms of communication." This could, for example, include video further down the line.
The chat is primarily available for Web and mobile applications, and TouchCommerce has also leveraged these channels to expand uses to the in-store experience with its TouchStore solution.
It currently supports the iOS and Android operating systems, but work is going on to support the Windows environment as well, according to Kalika.
"As the core foundation of our technology ecosystem, the TouchCommerce Conversation Platform enables various technologies and areas of operation to interconnect effortlessly in order to help brands engage their customers on any channel, anytime, anywhere," said Bernard Louvat, president and CEO of TouchCommerce, in a statement. "With our latest updates, the customer experience we have developed integrates even more easily with brands' existing systems and is more flexible on the back end for helping brands understand, serve, and convert their customers."
Key APIs and integration framework components have been defined and implemented across the following areas of the TouchCommerce Conversation Platform:
- RightTouch Flexible Integration Framework — This framework allows enterprises to integrate available client and third-party data into the RightTouch system. The latest release focuses on advancing how third-party content is displayed to customers and agents within the RightTouch user experience.
- Customer and Agent Engagement APIs — By defining formal communication between any chat interface and the RightTouch engine, the APIs enable third parties to integrate the TouchCommerce live chat and agent console functionality into their applications.
- Invitation API — This API can generate custom invitations to be displayed via any medium, leading to a chat engagement, an automated guide, a video, or a targeted offer connecting consumer journey touchpoints. The latest updates streamline the highly targeted RightTouch engagement experience across all channels and extend the targeting capabilities of the TouchCommerce platform beyond online engagement.
- Reporting API — This API lets users extract in real time a rich set of RightTouch engagement metrics (i.e. targeted, engaged, converted) and historical transcript (conversation) data into external systems. The latest release can be used to integrate TouchCommerce data with a variety of reporting applications and dashboards.
TouchCommerce customers have already started incorporating the updated Conversation Platform into their customer engagement infrastructures. Some customers have even taken on development to test ideas and/or achieve specific integration objectives.
The TouchCommerce Conversation Platform "enables companies to engage in conversations with their customers on any channel," Kalika says.
TouchCommerce clients are typically larger enterprises in the telecommunications, financial services, retail, technology, and travel and hospitality verticals, according to Kalika, and those are the companies that TouchCommerce is targeting with this release.