The API ecosystem
blueprint
How APIs are delivering better
customer experiences, greater
productivity, and increased
business flexibility at breakneck speed

Introduction

APIs are the catalyst for
digital transformation

However, for the majority of businesses, the value of APIs havelargely flown under the radar. It’s only now, with a global pandemic
forcing us indoors and online, that companies are waking up to theimportance of APIs in building flexible and resilient operations.

As Armando Torrealba Echiburú, Product Design Director at Xero
explains, “For me, the API conversation is very similar to the UXAPIs have quietly been the backbone of many online businesses inconversation five years ago, where people were debating the value ofrecent years—eBay processes over $7 billion in transactions throughUX. It’s the same with APIs — they are an investment you do wellits APIs by allowing websites to list auctions, get bidder information

once and it pays off for a really long time. The benefits will

about sold items, collect feedback on transactions, and list new items

demonstrate themselves, but only if you look at the value offor sale. And before the pandemic, Expedia processed 90% of its $2

integrating seamlessly and all the overheads you save by integrating

billion annual revenue by allowing people on third-party websites toevery time with different partners.”

use its functionality, through APIs, to book flights, cars, and hotels.

But to realize the potential of APIs, organizations must first rethink
the way they deploy and operate software, refocusing around an
ecosystem of API-based microservices.

This retooling around APIs—rather than traditional monolithic
software systems—opens up improved digital experiences forcustomers, helps teams operate with greater productivity, and offers
businesses greater flexibility to adapt to new expectations andchallenges at pace.

However, with millions of APIs out there—tools, process efficiencies,and data sharing to name a few — it’s hard to know exactly how
everything fits together or where to start.

It’s why we’ve developed the API ecosystem blueprint—your guide tobuilding a thriving application ecosystem by centering your businessaround APIs.

Contents
Chapter 1

Winning architecture for an increasingly competitiveenvironment  

Chapter 2

Prioritize customer experienceChapter 3

Give your teams scalable superpowers aChapter 4

Not all APIs are created equal

Conclusion

Build a microservices ecosystem one step at a timeChapter1
Winning architecture for
an increasinglycompetitive world
APIs are the building blocks of today’s digital businesses. They’reworking behind the scenes in almost every online interaction wehave—Netflix, Facebook, and Uber are all underpinned by APIs. 

But as the number of APIs keeps growing, implementing andmanaging them is becoming a considerable challenge forbusinesses. Those that build modular API ecosystems are agile
enough to keep up with future innovations and customer
expectations. But those on an errant path will be forced to overhaul
their entire system and processes—a costly and time-intensiveventure. 

The stakes are high; that’s why it pays to think about API integration
the right way from the beginning.

Rethinking the way weorganize our software: frommonoliths to microservices
For the longest time, monolithic architecture was the default way tobuild an application. That is, you would build an entire application
around one business function, process, or 'job’. For example, whenbooking an airline ticket online, all of the steps—sign-up, flightselection, payment processing, confirmation emails—had to be
coded into a single do-it-all system. 

But as the world became more connected, customers began
demanding more from these systems—more personalization, more
speed, and smarter transactions. And so, pressure to update every
aspect of these specialized systems to meet the exact, and often
niche, needs of customers became an ever-growing challenge forbusinesses. 

Enter microservices architecture: a new, agile way of building
software that doesn’t attempt to be every part of the process.
Instead, businesses select the best tool for each part of theirsoftware and integrate them using APIs to create one overalloutcome or process.

To return to our plane ticket example, with a microservices
architecture, a business would find the best sign-up system,
payments-processing system, email-automation system, etc. andindividually integrate them—via APIs—into their own user interface.
The sum total of these integrated tools creates one cohesive bookingsystem.

The flexibility  of microservices

With today’s popular subscription pricing models, the cost of
picking up a new tool is lower than ever. So if a particular service in

Adopting an API-enabled microservices model lets businesses

your ecosystem doesn’t have a feature you or your customers want,build experiences from the best tools on the market, rather thanit’s as easy as unsubscribing and unplugging one API andbuilding every new feature and functionality from scratch.

integrating another with the right features.

But more than that, it offers businesses greater agility andAdditionally, API integration lightens the load on developers. Instead

flexibility to adapt to changing consumer expectations, as Mattof spending months developing new tools from scratch, they’re only

McLarty, Leader of API Strategy at MuleSoft says, “The real power

spending days integrating an API.  

of APIs is when we break business capabilities in our businessdown into these discrete API enabled capabilities. It gives us a lotof agility to rebound or to repackage things, to take best of breedfunctions and aim them at whatever channel we want; compose
them in whatever way we want.““With APIs, you can really get the best of breed. If you start building
everything in-house, it takes a lot of time to get all the functions inplace — engineering, strategy, support. With APIs, you can get thebest solution without the effort. Plus, if you’re not building
something internally, you have a chance to switch to the latest andgreatest. If your vendor hasn’t upgraded over time, you have theliberty to move quickly to a new vendor. If you’ve built in-house, youdon’t have that same fast-moving luxury,” says Akshay Sheth, SeniorEngineering Manager at FactSet Research Systems.

Once this fast-moving framework is up and running, it sets you up
to deliver features and experiences that delight customers and takea load off your development team.

Chapter2

Prioritize customer
experience

With such a level playing field and customers with an appetite forchange, small businesses have a unique opportunity to challenge

bigger competitors and take a larger market share. But to do that,
When it comes to the value of customer experiences, the numbers
your digital buying experience needs to match your consumers’
are clear: customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable. 

digital expectations.

The thing is, a great customer experience isn’t a “nice to have”

anymore. It’s essential just to compete. Why? Because customers

want to engage with businesses that put digital experiences first .

And if they can’t engage digitally on your platform, they will look for

another business where they can. 

84%

40%

So the question becomes, how exactly do you achieve a greatcustomer-centric experience? 

use digital channels

buy more online

more often

than they used toYou could spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars

building new capability from scratch. But why would you when APIs

make delivering a top-tier customer experience so much easier?

APIs unlock streamlined
customer experiences
76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs. Thismeans, just as customer expectations have risen, so too must theexperience companies deliver.

As Matt explains, “Business models are totally related to customerexperience. Because ultimately, customers are the driver of revenue,so everything that you focus on should help them, right? And I think
it's pretty clear that the companies that differentiate themselves inthe digital economy are differentiating based on customerexperience.”

From Dropbox

APIs have become the easiest and fastest way for companies totarget specific moments in the customer journey. By integrating
APIs, businesses can add incremental improvements that pre-empt
customers’ expectations across sales, customer service, marketing,and more. For instance, eCommerce workflows often use a Google
Maps API to help customers auto-complete addresses for a fasterbuying experience. 

But contact centers are where APIs really become powerful. Support
teams often struggle to reconcile multichannel customer interactions
because each channel uses a different app—Hootsuite for social,
Intercom for chat, a call center for phone calls. And this means
information falls through the cracks and customer interactions risk
becoming disjointed and frustrating.

Another powerful everyday API is the “log in using Google/
Facebook/Twitter” tool which streamlines the sign-up experience.
So rather than inputting personal data every time, APIs source itfrom a user’s existing accounts—with their authorization, of course.

However, with specific APIs, businesses can build informationsharing bridges between these systems to deliver a unified andconsistent customer experience no matter what channel aconversation takes place on.

Customer story

CGIA closes deals 17% faster with an API-led
customer experience
Traditionally, selling insurance has been a long and admin-prone
process for both customers and salespeople. With so many
documents, signatures, and approvals to manage, any reduction in
paperwork is a huge improvement to the customer experience.

By integrating the Dropbox Sign eSignature API into their insurance
workflow, CGIA completely digitized the signing processes,removing slow and annoying manual steps. 

“HelloSign’s [now Dropbox Sign] seamless signing experience has
allowed us to deliver evidence of insurance in real-time and we’veseen a reduction in the time it takes to close a sale. HelloSign [nowDropbox Sign] has become a necessity for our business as online
shoppers demand a hassle-free way to buy,” says Bob Negrey, VP ofInformation Technology at CGIA.

And it’s greatly improved CGIA’s speed of sales, too.

"With HelloSign [now Dropbox Sign] we’re able to close sales about17% faster compared to the manual signature process,” says Miguel
Huizar, producer for CGIA

Customers love data flow too
It’s not just experiential improvements that are making customers’
lives better though, the context and transparency of clean, flowing
data enabled by APIs also makes a huge difference to a customer’sjourney.

As explained by Armando, “One thing we get from our research isthat customers really appreciate having everything in one place. Andeven if everything’s not in one place, at least having the data in one
place where it makes sense. Integration even on a data level is reallyimportant.” 

Allowing data to flow through different apps can save users hours incontext-switching and manual data input between different tools
and applications.

Customer story

How an API integration simplifies contracts
for sales teams
One of the most time-intensive processes for salespeople is putting

an API integration that does just that. By embedding an eSignature

together contracts. Deal data, contact information, and digital

tool into the Salesforce platform, using the Dropbox Sign API,

contract tools often require endless switching between tools andSalesforce users can now build contracts, populate them with clienttabs just to pull everything together.

data, send them for signatures, and track progress without ever

Dropbox Sign saw this pain and imagined a better way of doing
things—sending contracts straight out of Salesforce. So they built

leaving Salesforce.

Chapter3
Give your teams
scalable superpowers
Unlocking high performance is the goal of any team leader. But
knowing how to achieve it is hard to pin down—is it motivation, thetools and processes they use (or lack), or something else?

So why not give your team the best tools for the job and find out? 

That’s what an API-led ecosystem is designed for. Teams can adopt
tools that fit their precise needs fast. And there are so many tools
out there helping teams operate at newfound scale, like
automations for HR professionals and marketing teams that sendout thousands of personalized contracts or emails with a singleclick.

Arm teams with the tools andinsights to work better

Employee retention: a happy
API side-effectMore than just operating at scale, API-connected tools are helping
teams operate smarter, too. As Akshay says, “By investing in APIs
you’re helping your internal teams move fast and make better
decisions by partnering with external vendors. APIs are the pathway
to that better efficiency and decision making.”  

There’s also a massive competitive cost to low-productivity teams:
employee attrition. 

For instance, API-enabled customer support tools such as Intercom
or Zendesk give customers simple measures to report and resolve
issues. But behind the scenes, these tools also guide customer
service teams with valuable data insights, like where customers arehaving the most problems or where issues keep occurring. And
when teams have this information at their fingertips, they canaddress the root causes of a problem and be proactive aboutfinding a solution.

If businesses don't equip top performers with the experiences andtools to do their jobs effectively, they’ll seek out companies that do.
And adding employee attrition to an already low-producing teamsets businesses up for failure.

But when you do equip your team with the latest tools—whether
that’s data analytics, faster processes, or simply a better work
experience, you not only get better results, you become more
attractive to top talent.

Customer story

Instacart saves 50+ hours a week
using an eSignature API
At any given time, Instacart contracts over ten thousand personal
shoppers to handle the shopping, packing, and delivery of groceries
to Instacart’s customers. Initially, Instacart relied on traditional penand-paper signatures to onboard new shoppers. But the application
process was awkward and lengthy.

To speed things up, Instacart used the Dropbox Sign eSignature
API to embed an online signature workflow and make all of its
paperwork completion happen digitally in its app.

And the results have been huge. Under Instacart’s legacy system,
processing paperwork took the team at least 3-5 minutes per
shopper — but by using Dropbox Sign, the Instacart team has saved
50+ hours per week.

Chapter

Beware, not all APIs are
created equal
The success of any ecosystem strategy relies on the ongoing health of its APIs,
including managing all integrations, ensuring they continue to work, and keeping
them secure.  

Though API upkeep is far less effort than building entire applications from scratch, itdoesn’t mean they won’t become a time-suck for your development team. 

Developers integrating APIs need to understand what the APIs do, how they work,
how people intend to use them, and what’s required to keep them running andsecure. And if this time and effort outweigh the benefits you’ll gain from theintegration itself, you’re losing out on the agility that microservices infrastructureoffers. 

That’s why you need to know exactly how to spot good API integrations when you
see them. Here’s what to watch out for.

Easy documentation
A well-designed developer portal stocked with high-quality, easy-to-follow API
documentation is essential. When you have clear, simple instructions,
integrating an API is fast and simple even for inexperienced developers.

4

“API documentation is very important. But you
have to make sure you've got different
personas in mind with the documentation.
Sometimes API documentation iscomprehensive — it's a reference of every
possible field. That’s not too usable if I’m afirst time API user. So I think you wantdifferent flavours of documentation whereyou've got reference documentation, quickstart documentation for beginner users, andscenario-based documentation, you want tocover it all.”— Matt McLarty, Leader of API Strategy at MuleSoft.

2. Ongoing dedicated support

3. SDKs

Dedicated API support is a must-have for API tools. The promise ofSoftware Development Kits (SDKs) are critical to a good API. SDKs

APIs is that they’re fast and easy to implement. So if you dogive developers the tools, libraries, documentation, code samples,

encounter a problem with an API integration, it’s critical that there’s aand processes to integrate an API, which speeds up implementation

dedicated support team behind it. That way if something breaks,

time considerably.

you’re not left unsure when a fix is coming.

“If you are implementing an API, you have avery limited window. It may work when
implementing an API but long-term support isa problem. If you don’t have a strong teamsupporting it, or if there is a question about
how to make it work, self-service anddocumentation can only go so far. It’s
important to have your team be part of theprocess.”— Akshay Sheth, Senior Engineering Manager at FactSet Research Systems

Customer story

The Dropbox Sign API hascustomers eSigning fast
On average, a Dropbox Sign API integration takes just 2.5 days—"I’ve implemented other APIs and it usually takes about a week.

the fastest in the industry*.

Dropbox Sign is using such forward-looking technology, along with

40% of Dropbox Sign API integrations are completed in 10 hours

clear and easy to understand documentation that I was able to do it in

88% of developers finished their integrations in 40 hours.

less than 3 hours. This was a record for me." — Brian Bristol, CTO and Co-Founder, Pigeon Loans*Source: G2 - Most Implementable 2020

Conclusion

Build a microservices
ecosystem one step
at a time

For businesses aspiring to compete in an experience-first world,
shifting to an API-led architecture is a necessary first step. 

But to get there requires a mental shift . Businesses must think ofAPIs as the building blocks of their entire operation; enablers of both
employee-to-customer and employee-to-employee interactions. Only
then can they start operating with the agility and flexibility to keep
up with customer expectations.

Sounds great, right? But it still leaves one final question: how do you
get started with APIs?

About Dropbox Sign

The answer, start small—one API at a time. 

Dropbox Sign simplifies work for millions of individuals. Companies
And the Dropbox Sign API is a great place to start your API journey.
all over the world rely on our eSignature solutions to power their
Dropbox Sign makes preparing, sending, and receiving legallyapplications, making it easier to close deals faster, onboard new
binding eSignatures smooth and seamless. 

hires, complete documents without error, and much more. For more
Ready to integrate eSignatures into your app or website? Test theDropbox Sign API for free.

information visit the Dropbox Sign website.