Leveraging API Documentation for Customer Support
Treating your API as a product means treating customer support as a first class citizen.
We have already recognised this by making sure that customer support is one of the 5 key metrics for your API strategy.
Now, let’s look at how customer support can be central to your API strategy and how customer and sales support should influence API documentation.
One Starting Point
Let’s start at the central pink circle. You are here: As an API product manager, you have probably built a team up to help manage your API documentation. This team might include tech writers and your API engineers. If you are thinking proactively, you will also have spoken with marketing and included a content marketing writer or content specialist to contribute to the team.
Now, proactively you go to your Sales Engineers teams and Customer Success Managers and you say:
We understand that what you do is important for the success of our whole business. How can we help you do your job better?
Your sales engineers and customer support teams are the customer-facing teams of your business. The sales engineers are your customer acquisition team. They are working with potential customers and helping them onboard to your products and services. Increasingly, as they do this, they will need to help new customers integrate with your API in order for the customer to get the value they are looking for from your business. Your sales engineers will need to navigate and use your API documentation themselves, as well as refer to it when supporting their customers to onboard.
Your customer support team is your customer retention team. They are working with your current customers to help them get more value out of your products and services, and to integrate your business into their own workflows. Your customer support and success teams, and account managers who work regularly with your enterprise customers, will need to know what is in your API documentation, will need to be able to refer to it themselves, and will need to be able to help customers make use of it to solve their specific needs.
Two Contextual Elements
Hopefully, your business has two contextual elements in place to help drive sales and support interest in API documentation.
For sales engineers, hopefully your API is in some way tied to sales commissions. Your API may be a point of key differentiation which brings customers to your business. But integration is not always part of the initial customer discussion, and if sales teams are focused on getting customers to sign up, in part to get their sales commission, discussing your API may seem like a distraction to the sales conversation unless it is a financial incentive.
Defining what sort of sales commissions make business sense might need to be a part of your API business model discussions.
For customer success staff, being able to appropriately tag their customer queries with enough details to explain how the customer is needing to use your API is crucial. It helps them:
- define what support they can offer your customers, and
- demonstrate that the business has the right resources to help them resolve customer needs.
Sales and customer roles are essential to building a successful business. As an API product manager and documentation team, you need to build good relationships with sales and customer support staff. Take them to lunch, pop in on their office space. Get to know them individually and commit in your calendar to regularly asking them what are the most common use cases they see and what are the most regular customer needs they resolve.
Three Core Reference Assets
Ideally, from building this rapport and collaboration, your docs team should be able to manage three assets on a monthly basis:
- an ongoing list of the top 15–20 use cases that customers are needing from your business products and services
- the top three use cases that your sales and customer support team are regularly discussing with customers in the past month
- a monthly report of the most frequent tags used by customer support when responding to queries.
Now your docs team can go through each these three assets and do an assessment of the quality of your docs in supporting your sales and customer support staff, and ultimately your customers.
Four Documentation Outputs
So by speaking and collaborating with sales and customer support teams, your docs team now has a greater sense of the key ways documentation needs to be used by internal staff and by end customers and their developer teams.
Now your docs team can start a continuous development loop of creating new customer-facing documentation.
When looking over the list of tagged queries from the last month, and from speaking with customer support about the top three use cases for the last month, your docs team might be able to start collecting the sorts of standard emails that customer support are writing to customers regularly. Can that email content be turned into a blog post? You could publish something quickly and let support know so that in future, when they are responding to customer requests, they can provide the link to the blog post for further details. They can provide feedback on drafts and help make sure it is useful for their work.
That same blog post/use case will then need to be incorporated into your overall API documentation roadmap. The blog post can be a short-term solution while updating your API documentation may take longer, as it may need to be more rigorously reviewed and be written while also maintaining progress on other technical writing tasks.
(By the way, by ‘API documentation’ we mean a whole range of content assets that may mean blog posts and documentation pages, but also sample code snippets, API wrappers, and other developer resources.)
Alongside this loop of blog post -> updated documentation, your content marketing specialist can help you with preparing two other forms of documentation assets.
Remember, your content marketing specialist is about helping make sure your API documentation can appeal to non-technical writers as well. Your technical writer will no doubt have some proficiency at this but that is not their core focus. Content marketing specialists can really help extend your API docs to non-technical customer support and sales audiences and to be understandable and useful to end customers.
There may be two main types of documentation that can be created here. The first is additional API documentation pages that talk through your API for non-technical audiences. These content assets will use the 15–20 use cases and the top three monthly use cases as the inspiration.
Alongside that, there may be a need to explain how to use your API within an industry context to your potential customers. You probably work with a number of industry verticals. You need to be able to speak with customers in those verticals. There are some great examples of how API providers are doing that. Here are three examples I love:
- WePay is a payments provider API for marketplaces and platforms. So their API docs include a tutorial on how to build a crowdfunding platform.
- Shippo is a global shipping and delivery tracking API. So their blog posts regular have articles on e-commerce tips and tricks.
- SimilarWeb is a digital market intelligence platform. They have separate landing pages for ad tech, insurance, travel and publishing. Their API landing page continues the theme of explaining how these industries can make programmatic use of their data via their API. (Also, if you click on one of the industry landing pages, a customer support person will connect via online chat to help you make use of the API for that industry use case.)
Stronger Internal Relationships Connect with More Customers
Build relationships and rapport with your sales and customer support teams. Incorporate their needs into your documentation roadmap. In a future blog post, we will look at how to then start applying metrics to measure the impact of your API documentation in supporting customers and customer success staff.
In 2017, treat your API as a product. Make sure you offer high value support to everyone using your API. To do that, you need to be collaborating with your sales and customer support teams. You will be amazed at how inspiring this can be!
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