Introduction
Communication is of ever-growing importance within our modern world. Keeping connected to your customers is vital to the success of your business. Building communication solutions that are able to keep up with this need is challenging. Azure Communication Services takes the pain out of this scenario by providing services and products that allow you to deploy custom communication solutions easily with Azure. Additionally, with Azure Communication Services, you don't need to be an expert in the underlying technologies such as media encoding or telephony; Azure Communication Services takes care of it for you.
Example scenario
Let's start with an example scenario that can help you understand the potential of Azure Communication Services. Imagine that you work on the engineering/product team of a household appliance producer (Contoso Appliances) that offers many appliances for the household such as refrigerators, washers, and dryers. As a company, you've been struggling with contacting and communicating with your customers when it comes to support, sales, and maintenance.
This situation has led to several problems in the business, such as:
- Missed maintenance appointments
- Overbooked maintenance appointments
- Poor customer-support satisfaction scores
- High customer bounce rate
- High percentages of incomplete orders
You and your team have been tasked to fix this issue. The team has come up with some ideas and features, such as:
- Live chat on the website
- Video support and maintenance calls
- Streamlined maintenance booking and appointments
- SMS reminders of maintenance & installation appointments
However, the team is unsure how to proceed. Do they use open source WebRTC components and build communication capabilities using low-level infrastructure? How do they get phone numbers? As software developers, getting phone numbers for programmatic SMS access isn't trivial. Budgets are tight, as is time. Your company wants this problem to be solved as quickly as possible.
This scenario is exactly what Azure Communication Services can help with.
What will we be doing?
In this module, you'll:
- Discover the various components of Azure Communication Services.
- Learn how they can be used to solve communication-related scenarios, such as the preceding example.
- Learn how to evaluate if Azure Communication Services is the right solution for your communication problems.
What's the main goal?
By the end of this session, you'll be able to evaluate Azure Communication Services for its suitability to make sure it's the right choice for your business.