apidays LIVE Paris - Lessons learnt supporting developers by Mathieu Pincovai
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apidays LIVE Paris - Responding to the New Normal with APIs for Business, People and Society December 8, 9 & 10, 2020 Lessons learnt supporting developers Mathieu Pincovai, Customer Success Specialist at Amadeus for Developers
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apidays LIVE Paris - Lessons learnt supporting developers by Mathieu Pincovai
- 1. CONFIDENTIAL & RESTRICTED Lessons learned supporting developers Mathieu Pincovai API Days Paris December 9th 2020
- 2. CONFIDENTIAL & RESTRICTED 47% of customers would stop buying from a company if the experience is subpar’’ ‘’76% of customers now say it’s easier than ever to take their business elsewhere” “ & Salesforce (The State of the Connected Customer)
- 4. Lessons learned supporting developers Mathieu Pincovai Customer Success Specialist Amadeus for Developers October/2020
- 5. 1. Don’t let anyone get lose in your internal processes
- 7. CONFIDENTIAL & RESTRICTED GET/ Point of contacts © Amadeus IT Group and its affiliates and subsidiaries | Confidential and restricted Who are the experts in your company? Are they easily available for questions? Are the technical/functional/industry gaps covered?
- 8. 2. Adopt a ’Self-Service’ mindset
- 9. CONFIDENTIAL & RESTRICTED Make answers Self- Service Open documentation Guides Prototypes SDKs SDK “
- 10. CONFIDENTIAL & RESTRICTED Handle first level support within your team 1 Can it be reproduced? 2 Is the issue API related? 3 Is the documentation clear enough?
- 11. 3. Invest in the right tools from the start
- 12. CONFIDENTIAL & RESTRICTED API performance monitoring Daily tests Logs available Test from different IPs
- 13. CONFIDENTIAL & RESTRICTED Support Ticketing system Templates Automation KPIs
- 14. 4. Be proactive on feedback
- 15. CONFIDENTIAL & RESTRICTED PATCH/ Feedback Proactively seek feedback Regularly review and prioritize Repeat! “
- 16. CONFIDENTIAL & RESTRICTED Stay organized Consolidate multi channel feedback Keep a record of everything, the good and bad
- 17. 5. Consider creating a community
- 18. CONFIDENTIAL & RESTRICTED POST /community Useful feedback Community support Contributions from members
- 19. CONFIDENTIAL & RESTRICTED POST / community Create a community channel Monitor Stack Overflow Add value to your users
- 20. 6. Support your support team
- 21. CONFIDENTIAL & RESTRICTED Make sure you are not alone
- 22. CONFIDENTIAL & RESTRICTED Don’t overanalyze! I want API
- 24. 7. Be empathetic
- 25. CONFIDENTIAL & RESTRICTED print(Empathy) Show that you understand and care about your users Don’t fake it Be authentic Customer success mindset
- 26. CONFIDENTIAL & RESTRICTED KEEP CALM AND SUPPORT SUM(Recap) Find what works for you A case at a time, don’t panic! Empathy, empathy, empathy
- 27. Thank you! Let’s talk! • https://developers.amadeus.com • mathieu.pincovai@amadeus.com • @amadeus4dev
Editor's Notes
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- I am sure many of you have seen this chart. It’s the growing number of API providers listen on ProgrammableWeb. Now counting more than 23k. It’s absolutely amazing for innovation as whole. But it also means that with more and more API providers on the market, if you fail to satisfy your users, they will go to someone else. Therefore, in my opinion, good developer support is now more important than ever. Having a key impact on adoption, as developers will look at the support you provide before investing time and resources in your technology. But more importantly in user retention, because let’s face it why would a developer keep paying for an API if the support, they receive is not satisfactory, when they can just switch provider. And remember, 20k+ open APIs on the market and the number keeps growing, it’s never been easier to find a new provider
- My name is Mat Pincovai, from Amadeus for Developers. I’ve been working there for the past 3 years, and from the very launch of the program I’ve been helping developers integrate our technology to power their travel applications. And today I will share with you 9 key points I’ve learned in this time that you should consider in your customer support strategy. For full disclosure, I must also say that I don’t have all the answers, but hopefully you can learn somethings from what worked well for us.
- The first point I wanted to mention, make sure that the people who contact you don’t get lost in your support internal processes. By that I mean, make sure they are not sent across different teams in your organization to get an answer.
- When that happens, it is important that you can channel the developers asking you questions to the right people in your company, all by reducing this internal complexity to the developers. You do not want someone asking you a question, and then having to talk to 5 different teams internally to get a simple answer. Make sure you know who the right point of contacts is, and that they are aware of you and can provide you with quick answers if needed. If your company only has a few products this still applies, do you know who the technical experts are, do you have access to a PM? Industry experts? All about hiding this internal complexity to your users and save them time. When I first started in Amadeus this was key for me, I did not have much experience in tech and even less about the travel industry, very quickly users started asking questions about not only the APIs, but the industry (question example). This was very important for me, not only to help increase the response time to questions and avoid people getting ‘’stuck’’ in our internal processes, but also to reduce stress. Because trust me, you want to feel like you have a safety net, or someone to go to for answers when someone is asking you something very tricky.
- Second point, this is a common best practice of good API programs, but it will help you with a lot of things including support, and that is giving easy access to free and updated documentation.
- To me this is critical, you should follow a ‘’Self-Service’’ mindset, where anyone could find the answers to their questions themselves without contacting support. A good documentation section is a great way to do this. Try to anticipate your main pain points around your APIs and create documentation around it. Best yet, consider creating SDKs and prototypes to assist developers and showcase your tech. These can be included in your answers and can also help to build trust with your users.
- To me this is critical, you should follow a ‘’Self-Service’’ mindset, where anyone could find the answers to their questions themselves without contacting support. A good documentation section is a great way to do this. Try to anticipate your main pain points around your APIs and create documentation around it. Best yet, consider creating SDKs and prototypes to assist developers and showcase your tech. These can be included in your answers and can also help to build trust with your users.
- My next point might not apply to all, but if your program is mature and you have enough users, consider creating a community around your APIs
- To me the holy grail of user support, is when users are helping each other out and are doing some of your job for you. Of course, this is incredibly difficult to achieve. A good example of a company doing this well, is Salesforce. Their community is so big that if you encounter an issue, you could ask in their forum and someone around the world will probably have a solution for you. This is of course very advanced, but there are ways to achieve this on a smaller scale. Firstly, if you have an open API, I think all of you should be monitoring questions on Stack Overflow. This can give you the foundation for your community. We try to encourage all our users to ask their question on SO, and our team of developer advocates monitor it daily. This is also a create way to work on the trust element I mentioned before, if you a develop looking for a simple API, you find something that matches your needs but the company in questions has a ton of unanswered questions, trust me they will think twice about using your services. Something else you can do to foster this feeling of community, is to create a group chat around your APIs. For this we use Discord. It’s a nice way to give your users a voice, and we found it was easier to have meaningful interactions with users that way. Since we launched this, we have had an increasing amount of questions on there. It’s a much more informal channel, and some developers seem to like it for quick questions. This is a very interesting topic in my opinion. Hard to achieve, but worth it. Of course, there are some things to consider as well. If you create a similar chat, get ready to receive support questions on there, its very important to monitor it often and make sure everyone gets quick answers as people will expect a much quick response time in chats like this.
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