How to implement a scalable support strategy for your API
Customer service, specifically for digital products and services, has become very sophisticated in the last few years. There are established best practices around it, very powerful tools to manage it, and a general consensus around key indicators to measure the scale of support as well as its quality.
As companies grow, many support teams face some common challenges which require strategic thinking: give or take, we’re talking about problems around scaling support and improving the customer experience. If you didn’t have a support strategy from the get go, you’ll definitely need one at this point.
These challenges are not alien to APIs. However, they present a series of specific challenges which I’ll address in this article. Hopefully I’ll raise some questions that help providers think beyond the implementation and launch phase, and more into the evolution of the API.
But first, we’ve been talking A LOT about API support, so what exactly is it?
The way we understand API support here at Hitch differs a bit from the traditional way of seeing support. APIs are at the forefront of a revolution in how services, consumers and companies connect, and this requires new innovative ways of building business processes.
When we say API support, we don’t just mean having a team of support guys behind a helpdesk answering questions via email or phone. We mean proactively giving consumers everything they need to start working with an API (remember Ori Pekelman’s 3:30:3 rule?
Bad support is sticking to answering tickets, good support is baking a mix of reactive and proactive approaches to serve customers before they even reach out to you with a problem.
Based on our relationships with many API providers out there, we can easily group quite a few areas and activities around API support:
- Developer onboarding
- Documentation production and maintenance
- Notifications to the community about changes in the API, new versions, etc
- Self service support through automation tools
- Ability to handle more advanced integration questions
- Processing consumer feedback
- Implementing API support analytics
One thing is clear: developers don’t like to be sold to, they want clear information on how your API works, to help them understand if it solves their business problem. Otherwise they will move on to the next product.
In this scenario, providing stellar support can be a very effective way of starting relationships with potential leads, not by inflating your product in any way, but by listening to them, and most importantly, helping them accomplish their goals.
Some support challenges specific to API teams
If you’re looking to implement a scalable and customer centric support strategy for your API, here’s a list of things you will need to consider.
Internal challenges
For companies building out their API team, or transitioning from more traditional ways of operating (for example companies with a primary line of products and launching an API), I’d say there are five things to consider:
- Training. Your team might be great at supporting your primary product, but know nothing about APIs.
- Building a specialized API support team. You might simply create a separate team of engineers with the skills and experience to provide API support, or allocate it to your level 2 or 3 tiers.
- Enabling support people to access product updates and resources. This is key and is often overlooked. The first stakeholders who need to understand your product, and how it changes and evolves, are your support guys.
- Establishing cross functional processes. What is the frontier between developer evangelism and support? How should support teams interact with technical writers so your documentation is continuously improved?
- Identifying new business opportunities from support interactions and handing over to your sales team.
- Centralizing feedback. This might come from support interactions, evangelism activities, etc. What is the process to ensure technical feedback is heard by your product managers?
Raising these questions can help you understand ownership of the different touchpoints with your consumers throughout their lifecycle.
They will also help you move on to more specific issues like what parts of your workflows to automate, what are the appropriate channels to engage the community, and what internal tools need to be rolled out to empower and measure the different teams involved.
Customer facing challenges
As explained above, developers don’t want to waste time in figuring out cumbersome APIs with poor documentation. And some of them will voice it, which can damage the reputation of your API.
Based on this, there are a few challenges that need to be addressed:
- Your onboarding needs to be quick, easy, and available for anyone on a 24/7 basis. Ideally it should also reflect different learning styles.
- Documentation needs to be useful and easy to work with (include Hello World instructions, clear explanations on endpoints, methods and parameters, code samples, error descriptions, etc.) and up to date (you will probably want to automate this using Hitch)
- You should set up the appropriate channels to enable more complex discussions with the API consumer, and manage that in a scalable way
Conclusion: making the case for a complete API support makeover
Ideally, if you are an API-first company, you’ll be thinking about developer engagement and support in the early stages of creating your API. If this is the case, your API support strategy should be aligned with your overall Customer Experience strategy and business goals. A key exercise around this is to understand how you will segment your customers, and define the support offering for each tier.
But in many scenarios, this will not be the case. You will need to make the case for the API from a support perspective, and influence decision makers. One example of this is getting funding to hire a complete new team of support agents, or investing in new tools.
One way to make the case for API support internally is showing the business implications of NOT taking radical action.
You might find this article useful to calculate the cost of your API, and show how support is the single cost that will skyrocket as your community grows, unless you invest scaling and automating early on.
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