Enhancing User Journeys

Determining customer touchpoints

The stages of the customer journey can also be viewed in the form of a customer funnel, with customers entering the funnel at discovery and moving step-by-step toward evaluation, integration, deployment, and ultimately, observability. From a business standpoint, we want to enable customers to move from one stage to the next as smoothly as possible.

There are several touch points throughout the customer journey, and we touched upon a few of them in the previous section. When we design our API experience, we should think of the questions our customers have in mind and try to find ways to provide that information in an easy-to-consume manner.

When our customers discover our APIs, it might be through channels such as social media such as YouTube, Twitter, and so on; Google Search; events; newsletters; white papers; and so on that lead them to our developer landing page where they can start to learn about our APIs. These channels are the first touch point between us and our customers and are also at the top of our customer funnel. Chances are that not all customers who land on our developer landing page will end up learning more about our API offering, where they would consider pricing, read through the documentation, and so on. The number of people who spend time on our developer landing page and learn about integrating with our APIs is the number of customers who show more intent to integrate with our APIs. We can measure the percentage of these customers, and that percentage is considered the conversion rate of customers at the discovery stage. In the same way, we can figure out conversion rates for each stage of the customer journey and for each touch point along the way.

These conversion rates are important because they help us figure out how effective and useful the tools and information we give our customers on their journey are. In the following section, we'll learn how to evaluate these touch points as points of friction or conversion.

Identifying friction and conversion points

All the touch points that a customer experiences as they go through the user journey are components of our API experience. The API experience includes everything from developer landing pages, API references, blogs, video tutorials, as well as support channels. As we analyze the customer journey, the question we must ask is which touchpoints are helping our customers and which ones could be improved.

For example, if we have 100,000 views on our YouTube tutorial on getting started with our APIs but only a few hundred users are clicking on the link to our developer landing page to sign up and get started, there might be an opportunity to improve the content or place the link in a more visible position to help discovery. Our ability to measure any component or content is dependent on having clear call to actions at each step that we can track.

Our user experience must be designed in such a way that there is an unambiguous call to action on each page that our user views and a finite set of actions that the user takes to move to the next stage of integration. This ensures that our users have clarity on how to move ahead in the process and that pages are not overloaded with paths that they can take.

The conversion rates for each stage of the customer journey are known as the conversion funnel for our customers. When a user moves from the first step of discovery of the product to a significant stage in the customer journey in terms of business impact, we can set that stage as the activation rate. For example, if from 100,000 views on YouTube, 800 users were able to sign up on the developer portal to get their credentials and make their first API call, then those 800 users have successfully activated their accounts and we have an activation rate of 0.008% from YouTube. In this case, the event of the first API call is significant in the user journey.

We can also track which pages have led to the most support tickets being created to date. It is expected that pricing pages will lead to a number of support requests where customers ask clarifying questions regarding pricing. However, this is not always the case. If the pricing is far too high, customers might leave the page without further inquiry.

We can also run surveys on various components of our API experience to get more quantitative and qualitative feedback from customers while they are on the pages. Surveys ensure that the feedback we receive is immediate and not anecdotal. In the end, finding points of friction will help us figure out exactly which parts of our API experience need to be improved first. We could also find out which parts of our product are working and which aren’t by measuring conversion and getting regular feedback from users on each experience.