An API is useless without a customer base. Your API customers may be internal developers, selected partners or external users, what matters is that your API is accessible, easy to use, and increases value.
How do you know your customers are getting value from your API? How do you measure the customer success of your API?
Last week we looked at how API docs can be continuously improved so that customer support and sales teams can make use of them in their customer relationships work. Customer support and sales are the key to your business growth. Making sure your API is understood by these two teams is an often forgotten but crucial component to your API evangelism efforts.
In January, we looked at the five metrics every API strategy should measure. Now let’s apply that lens to measuring the impact of an API strategy (and, in particular, API documentation) on customer support and sales.
1. Customer-centricity metrics
Every business looking to survive and grow needs to have a customer-centricity mantra. While digital transformation may be the buzzword many use to talk about introducing APIs to the business plan, the truth is that digital transformation is only the means to achieve a greater connection with customers. APIs are about connecting systems and enabling realtime data flows so that businesses can better respond to (and pre-empt) customer needs and wants.
Business metrics can centre around how well the customer support team and API strategy are connected. Outcome metrics here would focus on measuring the value impact of new product features and initiatives that were created and implemented from insights gained in customer feedback. The starting point for this will be to measure activities that ensure that the API team receives customer feedback on API usage in some way. Once those processes are in place and measured regularly, you can start to count how many API enhancements or new documentation resources were initiated out of customer feedback.
Example metrics to introduce could include:
- Types of customer support reports in place that were shared with the API team in the last month (eg. list of top 3–5 use cases from all customer support and sales conversations, report with customer support queries tagged by subject)
- Number of meetings (formal or informal) between customer support and sales and the API team in the last month
- Number of actions taken (new API enhancements, fixes, documentation resources, etc) to followup on issues raised in reports and meetings
2. Revenue impact
As we discussed last week, commissions should be calculated on product sales that include an API component. Until the sales business model explicitly includes a way to provide a commission for selling your API, sales staff will not be motivated to look for opportunities to discuss the API with new customers. (Evercam also encountered this challenge when they were focused on selling their API through external partners.)
Example metrics to introduce could include:
- Number of monthly users who bought a product offering that included API access
- Number of new customers in last month that explicitly requested API access as part of customer onboarding
- Number of existing customers who maintained their paid subscription or elevated their plan who have had at least one solved API-related support ticket issue versus churn rate of all customers who have used customer support at least once
3. Growth metrics
API documentation should be a force multiplier that you can use ten times over. While API strategies involve doing things that don’t scale — such as reaching out to new signups individually — one thing that you can do early on that does scale is to provide great documentation.
Metrics looking at how API documentation can be a growth enabler could include:
- Percentage of blog posts, documentation pages, tutorials, sample code snippets and other resources that directly match each query tag from your customer support reporting
- Percentage of the top 15–20 use cases for your API that have dedicated documentation resources available
4. Support effectiveness metrics
This can be a tricky area to measure and needs some considered thought.
For example, do you really want to measure speed of closed support tickets? Perhaps a better measure would be: was customer support able to provide a documentation link to help a customer solve a problem quickly, without having to write a long email?
This is one of the benefits of having regular discussions with your support team and reviewing reports of what tags they used in logging their queries. Those collaboration processes should help you identify what documentation needs to be provided to help customers get the value they are looking for out of your API.
Other metrics could include:
- Number of issues that did not escalate because customer was supported with API docs
- Time/money saved from not escalating customer support queries because they were solved with API docs
5. Opportunity enhancement
All tech businesses have a responsibility to think through how they can support communities and enhance opportunity rather than limit participation, skew wealth and opportunity to those who already have the most access, or irresponsibly consume resources in production and distribution. Actually, every business has that responsibility but tech moves at such a speed that the impacts to do harm occur at a much faster rate. What gets measured matters, so adding metrics that highlight how an API strategy can enhance positive social impacts is the only way to make sure that the wider impacts of your business and API strategy are considered.
Where you are contributing to the developer community by offering open source projects (like API wrappers and SDKs), it is important to remember that the number of bug issues or pull requests to your repos may not necessarily be a good measure of community engagement: perhaps you are serving up such poor projects that a lot of community members need to do your work for you before they can make use of the project!
Ways to measure your API’s capacity to enhance opportunity could include:
- Number of support calls from non-profits, social good businesses, and government agencies
- Number of use cases discussed by customer support and sales teams that have some social and/or environmental good impact
- Active engagement in your open source projects that add value rather than correct problems
Building a data-driven approach to your API strategy
One of the key themes I see this year is that APIs need to be treated as products. And that means that customer support needs to be considered as a first class citizen in your API strategy. Measuring the customer support impacts of your API strategy in ways outlined here is essential. What metrics do you actively measure to assess how your API strategy is increasing customer value?
Did you know that Hitch can help you scale and automate your API support? Get in touch with us to learn more.
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