Choosing the right webhooks for better customer experiences at scale

Chances are you’re already communicating with your customers on more than one channel. Whether you’re sending marketing messages, authentication passwords, providing customer support, or conducting after sales management, it’s common to use multiple channels. But you’ve probably also considered the need for a more efficient and effective way to manage all those communication channels and engagement campaigns.

That’s why businesses that prioritize meaningful customer engagement are taking advantage of communication APIs connected to unified communication platforms to optimize their omnichannel engagement strategies. This setup enables businesses to deliver consistent, personalized, and real-time engagement on the channels that consumers are most comfortable using.

Webhooks, also known as the “reverse API,” is a feature of cloud-based software that makes data sync processes more automated and efficient. In the specific case of unified communication platforms, webhooks make it easier for you to access real-time message updates across multiple engagement channels.

And because webhooks are considered lightweight and simpler in coding structure compared to traditional APIs, their benefits are most significant for companies that need to send or receive a large number of updates across thousands of URLs or third-party applications daily.

The importance of prioritizing webhook security and scalability

The main advantage of webhooks is their ability to automatically push information updates to a platform, rather than waiting for a request to come in first. Businesses can use webhooks to send appointment reminders or delivery updates, confirm completed payments, or automatically sync any changes in customer data between applications.

But the flipside of automation is the possibility that a webhook may cause unwanted data flows or wrong data types to be pushed. Webhooks are also particularly vulnerable to security attacks (webhook URLs are open to public access) and hosting provider downtimes, so businesses need to check that the webhooks they’re deploying have been designed by a service provider that takes security and user experience seriously.

So, to evaluate whether a webhook solution is right for you, always ask your tech partner the following questions:

  • Are there proper authentication mechanisms in place to ensure you’re receiving data from a verified URL?
  • Do you have control over version upgrades?
  • Can the webhook accommodate multiple event types in the event that your business pivots or scales in the future?
  • Has the webhook been designed to make it easy for your developers to integrate it into your existing tech stack?
  • Is there proper onboarding support to help you with customization, especially with regard to third-party integrations?

Also consider the provider’s capacity to scale. As your business gets increasingly popular and your number of customers and engagement channels grows, it’s important to ensure that the webhooks you’re using can handle the consequent increase in data volumes. Because webhooks work on a queue-based system, it’s easy to reach capacity limits unless there is some form of queue management on the part of your service provider.

Picture a highway getting filled with vehicles. If there’s only one exit point, traffic can quickly back up and cause delays. To better manage that traffic, your service provider needs to have a proper resource allocation strategy in place to segregate and prioritize data streams, redirect traffic and open up new side roads to ease congestion and keep things flowing smoothly. This is critical so that you can maintain operational efficiency even in the face of event spikes.

When it comes to webhooks, always ask about error handling and recovery

Keep in mind that webhook uptime is never 100%. No matter how many precautions you take, there are always risks of issues popping up, including expired certificates, server timeouts, invalid URLs, broken endpoints and more. In such cases, your webhook provider needs to be able to address these errors so that you can continue receiving data from your third-party applications.

A responsible service provider will have certain best practices in place for error handling and recovery. For example, a retry logic that has an exponential back off strategy spanning one to three days, after which it may suspend the misconfigured or failing webhook and alert you of the suspension.

While your provider bears some responsibility for managing webhook errors, it’s also a good idea not to rely solely on them for troubleshooting and investigation. Make sure you have full control over your retry system, and that you have full access to the audit trail of webhook failures, so you can get the information you need for debugging. If you can find a provider that delivers that data in a user-friendly dashboard with clear metrics and analytics, even better.

The right webhook solution is one that grows with you

Working with a great tech partner can make a difference in how you manage and scale your customer engagement experiences. A webhook that’s simple, secure, scalable, reliable, and future-proof takes commitment and innovative thinking from the engineering team that built it. So, beyond looking at the product itself, it’s important to look at who is developing your product, whether it’s a webhook, an API, a software, or a cloud-based platform.

These insights were shared by Anton Shchekalov, VP of Engineering CPaaS, at the apidays INTERFACE virtual conference held on 8-9 June 2022. To get more information on what to consider when evaluating a webhook’s scalability, watch the full speaker session.