{"id":22910,"date":"2020-02-04T15:26:32","date_gmt":"2020-02-04T15:26:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/?p=22910"},"modified":"2020-09-17T11:10:34","modified_gmt":"2020-09-17T10:10:34","slug":"building-api-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/building-api-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Building an API for powerful customer data analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today we\u2019re delighted to launch our brand new API version 2.0<\/a>, which makes it easier for our customers to pull, analyze, and update Intercom contact and conversation data. This will more easily allow our customers to transform their data into valuable performance reports and business insights.<\/p>\n

It consists of an overhauled Conversations API, as well as brand new Contacts and Data Attributes APIs. Now you can filter contacts and conversations using any combination of fields, like contact location or conversation tag, to pull the exact data you want. Once you’ve updated your API version<\/a>, you can systematically tag conversations, as well as leverage newly exposed contact attributes, more granular conversation timestamps, and out-of-the-box conversation metrics.<\/p>\n

“We rebuilt our search capability in the new API to be more robust, intuitive and powerful in this release”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The benefits of this release are immense and enable you to improve your team\u2019s performance with custom reports, drive decision-making by leveraging your customer data in business intelligence tools, and deliver deeper context for more personalized customer conversations using your Intercom data.<\/p>\n

The area of search, in particular, has been transformed by this release, and I\u2019d like to dive into how we rebuilt our search capability in the new API to be more robust, intuitive and powerful.<\/p>\n

Finding the personal in the data<\/h2>\n

We often talk about our mission of making internet business personal \u2013 how we want to help companies foster better relationships with their customers through powerful, thoughtful technology.<\/p>\n

Online businesses might not get to meet their customers face to face in the way a coffee shop owner or corner store retailer do, but internet businesses can forge a sense of connection in other ways by leveraging data to offer more personalized, useful interactions. In order to support your customers effectively, you need to know who their customers are, and how they make their decisions.<\/p>\n

“If the data isn\u2019t easily searchable and usable, it can effectively come between a business and its customers, obscuring the real people we\u2019re trying to connect with”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However, key to this is having appropriate context \u2013 and at a large enough scale and with enough data, it\u2019s possible to lose the person in the numbers, so to speak. If the data isn\u2019t easily searchable and usable, it can effectively come between a business and its customers, obscuring the real people we\u2019re trying to connect with. Having the right tools in place to manage, access, and analyze that data is critical to getting the right context on your customers, and without that context, relationships are incredibly hard to build.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen this ourselves at Intercom \u2013 as we deal with more and more data, search becomes an increasingly fundamental problem. Accurate, robust, usable search is what makes all that data an asset rather than a hindrance.<\/p>\n

For our customers, it was increasingly vital that we supplied them with the tools to quickly and intuitively search their customer data. Our existing API was showing its age, limiting how our customers could search details about their own customers and conversations. It was also clear that, as the number and variety of our customers has grown dramatically over the years, we needed to devise a search capability that was flexible enough for any imaginable use case, while retaining intuitive discoverability.<\/p>\n

Searching for the right answers<\/h2>\n

Given the scale of the overhaul we were planning, we knew there was significant room to improve. For instance, our previous user filtering was limited to email address, and our User and Conversation list APIs only allowed ordering by a small number of attributes.<\/p>\n

Our APIs were not RESTful<\/a> or industry standard, and paging through lists of users was subpar.<\/p>\n

As we looked to develop our APIs we considered the huge number of jobs that people use Intercom for<\/a>, including jobs we might not yet be able to predict, and concluded that we should build a very versatile and intuitive search function into the API.<\/p>\n

We developed a set of principles for our APIs, and how we want them to behave. They should be:<\/p>\n