Our Customer Success team works with Enterprise plan customers to provide a smooth implementation for high-quality integrations. In this blog, learn how Smartcar commits to customer success and why our process sets us apart from other integrations you might be considering.
Customer success at Smartcar is driven by a firm understanding of why we exist.
We realized that the journey from sales to implementation is turbulent and unpredictable. Navigating the troughs of API variability without support is like flying through a storm without an air control tower.
You might end up on the wrong route and get lost. Or, you end up spending more effort than expected steering things back in the right direction.
Your flight time goes up, and your fuel continues to deplete. And you’re at the edge of your seat, hoping you have what you need to make a successful landing.
“When you’re building a software company, you realize that having a good Customer Success function is a big differentiator. You get along better with customers, learn from them, and help them become more successful,” says Scott Case, co-founder of Recurrent. “When I work with Smartcar’s Customer Success team, I see the kind of company that I want to build.”
Saving you the bumpy ride
We’ve gained experience working with integrations across 24 OEM APIs, compiling best practices and common mistakes along the way to help your team meet product timelines and avoid any downtime.
A connected car product unlocks many possibilities for businesses and drivers alike. But just like any emerging technology in the market, it comes with a unique set of challenges that you may not be all too familiar with, such as:
⚙️ Sudden API changes made by OEMs
🚘 Development limitations and variability for each vehicle brands
💬 Navigating errors and support requests from vehicle owners
We’ve worked with customers across many verticals to de-risk implementation and provide ongoing support for product launches. “Smartcar helps us walk through odd edge cases that we aren’t always able to fix,” says Andrew Leonard, Customer Success Manager at Recurrent. “Working on these edge cases in detail with the development team has helped Recurrent improve our own tools for customers.”
Our team runs an implementation process with two paths of focus — technical implementation and go-to-market, which includes support and resources for:
- Technical discovery: Getting to know your technical stack, dev cycles, and product timelines. This helps us determine the right approach based on your resources and shows you what works and what doesn’t for your particular use case.
- Requirement brainstorming: Working toward the requirements and scope of your integration implementation. Best practices differ across each OEM, but our experience working with integrations at scale can help guide you from the get-go on setting database schema, token refresh flows, polling frequencies, and more.
- Reviewing UI/UX and error handling: Providing strategic guidance on improving front-end UI/UX and error handling for backend systems.
- Launch prep: Beta testing and conducting QA processes for your app’s functionality before everything goes into production.
A process built for success
API implementation will cost your development team time, even with clear documentation and SDKs. So we’ve worked hard to organize a process that de-risks implementation and makes the lives of your developer and customer experience teams easier.
“My work specifically is customer-facing and there’ll be a lot of times when I’m responding to a customer, but [the Smartcar team] is giving me the answers I need. It’s nice that our communication is this quick because I don’t have to make our customers wait and I can get back to them with an answer by the end of the day.”
— Daniel Hartman, Customer Experience Manager at Rolling Energy Resources.
Through our experience onboarding developers and stakeholders, troubleshooting mission-critical bugs, and collaborating to identify growth opportunities and blockers, we learned that our customers find the most success when we go above and beyond the scopes of passive customer support.
We’re strategic partners invested in your product. We’ve codified our gold standards for customer success into a four-part process that sets you up for long-term growth right from the integration kick-off.
Planning your integration
Every customer’s integration looks different depending on use cases, vehicle brands, product timelines, and expectations for future growth. Based on your success criteria, we’ll plan your integration around Smartcar-recommended best practices, API design validation, and development milestones to set you on target for launch.
Working toward go-to-market goals
We’re fortunate to have worked with some of the most innovative businesses in the mobility space. Along the way, we learned that cutting-edge products take up a lot of resources, especially from smaller teams wearing multiple hats to get products shipped and ready for the market. So we included a go-to-market path to our implementation process to help companies optimize user conversion funnels, provide proactive problem-solving for user onboarding, and train internal employees on managing common questions from vehicle owners.
Launching your product
Launch day is exciting and nerve-wracking, but we’re here to make sure everything runs smoothly. We include on-call Smartcar support during product rollouts and rapid turnaround time on any issues.
“We have regular drivers who sign up for free and have questions about the onboarding process and sharing data. We trust Smartcar’s Customer Success team to work directly with our customers when they run into issues,” says Case.
Maintaining success
As your customer base matures and your product offerings grow, we work alongside you to keep integrations aligned with business goals and development targets. Customers will continue to work with a dedicated Customer Success Manager while having access to additional support channels like chat, email, and phone.
“Smartcar’s Customer Success team has been happy to jump on the phone with our customers when back and forth emailing became ineffective to address concerns,” Leonard adds. “Since Recurrent isn’t equipped to offer phone support at the moment, that’s been very helpful.”
Lean on our strengths, grow with our community
Think of us as extended members of your company. We’re here to share our knowledge, provide a fresh pair of eyes for all your great ideas, and most importantly, become an expert on your product so we can continue advocating for your success.
But we’re not the only ones rooting for you. Over the years, we’ve worked with and created a community of founders, developers, and technology enthusiasts who share the same excitement and vision for the future of mobility. Beyond the scope of technical implementation and development, we want to empower your growth through partnerships with our marketing team and introductions to other customers in our network.
More questions? Reach out to us at support@smartcar.com or send us a message through the chat icon on the bottom right of your screen.
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