Cost benefits of an omnichannel notifications API

Choosing the right notifications API for your solution isn’t always easy. There are numerous APIs to choose from for SMS, voice and email. Some providers specialise in just one, whilst other providers will have an API for each type. Then there is redundancy and capacity issues to consider. But herein lies the cost benefits of an omnichannel notifications API.

Multi channel APIs vs omnichannel APIs – the cost implications

Typically the onus is on a multi-disciplinary team to do the grunt work and overcome the numerous integration challenges: writing to multiple APIs; negotiating and managing multiple service provider partnerships; managing a lengthy, complex code base – it’s easy to see how costs can escalate.

At Alerting Hub we want to address these challenges. We take on the headaches and wrap these up in the Alerting Hub platform and API. We handle everything related to the delivery of your alerts and notifications – so you can focus on the content.

How Alerting Hub delivers the cost benefits of an omnichannel notifications API

Alerting Hub has a single API that enables you to send out SMS, voice and emails in a single API call. That’s multiple SMS, voice and email notifications that can be scheduled, triggered and automated.

The three main cost benefits of an omnichannel API relate to: code base; development time; and service provision. As can be seen below Alerting Hub can deliver significant savings.

Rich capability all wrapped up = 1/3 of the development time

Alerting Hub is built with mass notification solutions in mind, empowering everything from emergency notification systems to accounts receivable solutions to school communications. Compared to other messaging APIs our higher abstraction layer hides the complexity behind a number of key features reducing the time required to integrate a premium notifications capability:

• Send SMS or voice or email notifications or a combination
• Store content to send when required (the content is encrypted at rest)
• Create contact groups to use in alerts (the contact information is encrypted at rest)
• Schedule future alerting events – with our unique automated escalation feature
• Triggered alerts – via SMS with keyword or via our REST API
• IVR
• Monitoring delivery status and tracking responses
• Enable multi party group calls

Single API for all notification channels = 1/3 of the code base to manage

You don’t need to write to a separate SMS API and then to a separate voice API and email API. You don’t have to then figure out how to tie all these together for monitoring, tracking and reporting purposes.

It’s all covered in the one outbound Alerting Hub SendAlert API, and the one inbound CollectAlert to collate deliver and response information – significantly reducing the amount of code you have to write. But crucially it reduces the support overhead for that code.

Service providers managed = 1/3 of the suppliers, down to just one!

The ability to send a combination of sms, voice, email notifications is just one part of the challenge.  Ensuring your message gets out when it needs to is critical to many mass notification solutions. What if an SMS provider falls over? What if you need to get thousands of calls out in a matter of minutes? Redundancy and capacity has to be built in. This means building multiple service providers. With Alerting Hub that’s exactly what you have under the platform.

If one provider fails to deliver, traffic is automatically switched over and shared across our other providers. In addition should a be burst of capacity be required, the volume can be shared across many providers, to prevent being viewed as just ‘spam’.