Strapi Support Operations Run 12x Faster with Integrated Customer Dashboards Powered by Appsmith

One of the challenges businesses face when customer data is spread across multiple systems and places is the difficulty of accessing and consolidating relevant information. Customer support teams often need to access data from various sources, such as CRM systems, ticketing platforms, and knowledge bases, to provide accurate and timely support. However, this scattered data can lead to inefficiencies, as agents spend valuable time searching for information across different systems.

We spoke with Florent B., a DevOps Engineer at Strapi, who ensures the smooth operation of their infrastructure and implements solutions to improve their workflows. He shared the challenges they faced before using Appsmith and how it has improved their support operations for Strapi Cloud.

About Strapi

Strapi is an open-source headless CMS that provides users full control over their data. It is self-hosted and compatible with various databases, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, and SQLite. Strapi allows users to customize APIs, routes, and plugins to meet their needs.

In 2023, Strapi launched its new hosting platform called Strapi Cloud. It is a managed content platform that allows users to deploy Strapi applications quickly and easily.

Difficulties in accessing customer data leading to a time-consuming and cumbersome support process

After launching Strapi Cloud in May 2023, the team did not initially anticipate the need to consolidate their customers' databases into a single view. However, as Strapi Cloud went live, customers began to reach out to the support team with inquiries using email addresses or internal IDs for identification, and accessing the information needed was not straightforward.

During troubleshooting, Florent faced the challenge of navigating through hosting servers, databases, and multiple tools that store all the Cloud customer's data to correctly identify the customer, address their inquiries, and coordinate resolution/responses with the customer support team.

Initially, the team managed to handle these requests manually, as the number of inquiries was manageable. However, as the user base expanded and the volume of support inquiries increased, this manual process became unsustainable. The Strapi team spent approximately four months grappling with this laborious process before realizing they needed a more efficient solution.

Appsmith was the best low-code solution to centralize and provide easy access to their customer's data

Recognizing the need to streamline their support operations and centralize customer data, the team sought a new approach to accelerate their support process. This required a solution that would provide a consolidated view of customer information, and enable them to promptly address customer inquiries and troubleshoot issues more effectively.

To address this challenge, Florent evaluated different low-code options for internal tooling, including Appsmith, which was suggested by an Engineering Manager in the company. In the evaluation process, Appsmith stood out for its self-hosting capabilities to have full control over its data and infrastructure, strong community support, and open-source nature. These factors aligned well with Strapi's philosophy as an open-source project.

The goal of the project was to create a dashboard to manage all the data of Strapi Cloud users in a single view, including users, projects, deployments, and incidents. Florent was able to build the initial version of the Strapi Cloud dashboard with all of the project data in just one day using Appsmith.

Efficiently managing and retrieving customer’s information

Now, when there are support inquiries from Strapi Cloud users, Florent can easily navigate through the dashboard to access the users' data, their history on the Cloud, and relevant information about the app's health, activity, console, runtime logs, and more. Whether it's identifying a user using their email or project ID, Florent can quickly find all the relevant information needed for troubleshooting. The dashboard also provides easy access to the customer billing history.

With the help of Appsmith, Strapi was able to create user and project search pages, link data from different sources, and effectively access customer information. Since implementing Appsmith, the dashboard has become the central hub for them to manage and retrieve customer and project information, resulting in faster response times.

The ability to link data from various sources has significantly improved efficiency in troubleshooting customer issues. As Florent puts it, "It just takes me like 10 seconds to find the user's information. Without the dashboard, I would have to connect to the database, write queries, and it would take me around two minutes to access our private network and get connected to the database."

The “Strapi Cloud Admin” application in Appsmith.

Optimize your customer support process with Appsmith

Businesses should not compromise customer satisfaction due to difficulties in finding and accessing necessary information. Strapi leveraged Appsmith to create a centralized view of its database, making it easier to search for users, projects, and related resources.

If you are facing challenges in managing and accessing customer support data, consider using Appsmith to improve your processes and provide a better support experience for your customers. Check out our available versions and if you are looking for enterprise-grade support and reliability, be sure to get in touch with our team.

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