Shell Mobility

Summary

The Shell Mobility team recognized the importance of optimized developer portals and SDKs in streamlining onboarding, automating processes, and freeing up the core team to focus on product improvements rather than support tickets. Initially, the support team managed these challenges with a limited customer base. However, as the segment grew, enhancing the developer experience through clear, accessible documentation with well-defined use cases became essential.

About Shell Mobility

Shell is one of the world’s largest mobility retailers with more than 47,000 Shell-branded mobility locations in more than 80 markets. Every day, around 33 million customers visit their mobility locations for an evolving range of quality fuels, including electric vehicle charging, and convenience and non-fuel products and services. Shell currently has around 75,000 public charge points at retail sites, on-street locations, mobility hubs and destinations like supermarkets.

Project Goals

• Scale Developer Onboarding: Increase self-service onboarding with code-centric guides backed by robust SDKs

• Improve API Accessibility: Centralize documentation and provide consistent, self-serve onboarding resources.

• Preserve Core Engineering Focus: Enable the internal team to prioritize API innovation over SDK maintenance.

Key Challenges

• Onboarding at Scale: The team saw unprecedented growth in product adoption and wanted to provide a seamless experience to all onboarding clients. The challenge was to find a way to do this with the same customer enablement team.

• Customized Documentation Approach: Internal PoCs suggested that SDKs would help with technical onboarding, but building them internally meant careful planning and effort, often spanning up to three months per language. Scaling to multiple languages was only possible with automation.

• Preserve Core Engineering Focus: API references and onboarding guides were distributed across resources. Shell’s Customer Success Team had a vision to bring all the resources together in a single platform, allowing teams to create tailored experiences for different use cases and audiences.

• Hands-On Enterprise Support: Automation and self-service onboarding for the majority of developers meant Shell’s enablement team could offer enterprise support to key accounts and build stronger relationships.

Partnership with APIMatic

The Shell team explored APIMatic’s Developer Experience platform, providing a language-idiomatic onboarding experience that developers appreciate. The platform includes SDKs, comprehensive documentation, idiomatic code samples, API recipes, and an API playground.

• Integrated Documentation Portal: Centralized access to all API products for a seamless developer experience.

• Language-Idiomatic SDKs: Generate high-quality SDKs (not API wrappers) and SDK reference docs consistently across multiple programming languages.

• Code Samples, API Recipes, and an API Playground: Provide developers and non-developers with tools to discover and evaluate APIs easily.

• AI-Powered Onboarding: Smart assistance with real-time guidance, code samples, and recipes with an integrated AI chatbot.

Outcomes

• Improved Developer onboarding time by over 60%: Technical onboarding of clients became self-serve, and customers could go live in record time.

• Reduced White-glove treatment: Enhanced self-serve capabilities significantly lowered the need for manual assistance, allowing teams to focus on strategic priorities.

• Faster SDK Delivery: SDK generation is now nearly instantaneous, enabling rapid expansion across multiple programming languages and products.

• Improved Developer Satisfaction: Clients using the platform gave higher satisfaction scores because of the ease in building their integration.

• Developer Onboarding with AI: Shell is now leveraging APIMatic’s API Copilot, an AI-powered chatbot that enhances developer onboarding by delivering real-time answers, complete with accurate code samples and clear endpoint guidance.