Ecosystem rule #1: Technologies help each other

I invite you to think of what your life would be like without the help you have received from your family, friends, teachers, employers, colleagues, etc. I, for one, am extremely grateful to have had and continue to have people and organizations that complement my skills and abilities and help me move forward in all aspects of my life.

With this in mind, I started exploring Storyblok’s Ecosystem of technology partners. The goal was to see if the same concept applies to the relationships they have formed with each other. It came as no surprise that the benefits of those relationships expand way beyond the product placement and monetary attributes each partner enjoys. What did surprise me, however, was the realization of how enormous the difference technology partners make in each other’s day-to-day operations, be it in product/service enhancement, human resources, sales, customer relations, etc. It is now crystal clear how important it is to have all these technologies work together and help each other succeed.

I spoke with our Talent, Partner, Sales, and Developer Experience teams to try and find out how Storyblok’s CMS and us, the team members, benefit from incorporating certain technologies in our day-to-day. In this article, you will learn about how Storyblok’s user experience is so superior due to the use of technologies like Algolia, a Storyblok Technology Partner. In addition, you will see how our colleagues connect and collaborate with clients and partners, as well as with each other, with the help of technologies like Salesforce and Slack.

Search results in milliseconds with Algolia

Algolia Search, a product offered by our Technology Partner Algolia, allows developers to rely on a simple and robust API to compose any search experience in the context of their companies’ applications. It helps companies build an optimized and performant search experience for their users, which can be witnessed on Storyblok’s website.

We started using Algolia for Storyblok’s search page in order to overcome the challenge the company was having by using an extremely plain and not user-friendly search bar. The biggest issue was that keyword results would appear in each entry the keyword was mentioned, without any order or prioritization. Therefore, instead of searching the raw content of the website, we wanted to be able to crawl the website pages and index the content based on HTML tags so each search produces relevant and accurate results.

Today, with Algolia, Storyblok’s search engine provides an exceptional user experience due to the fact that website data is stored and organized in Algolia in a format that allows us to give priority to specific entries and parts of those entries, like headlines and paragraphs. We can tell the difference Algolia makes in the experience of our visitors for many reasons. Here are the top 4 reasons why we love Algolia:

1. Fast search performance: Storyblok’s website has a very large number of entries, a number that keeps growing every day. All these entries are stored in Algolia automatically and Algolia is able to provide search results for each query in about 2 milliseconds. What’s even better is that the speed remains the same regardless of the number of entries.
2. Customization: Each search result is displayed with highlighted keyword(s), which gives the user the ability to click on the desired results and ignore the results that do not have the keyword highlighted in the title, subtitle, or even first paragraph. This is a function performed by Algolia as it allows us to customize the HTML tags that are wrapping the keywords that are being searched (bold tag, span tag, etc.).
3. Typo tolerance: Typo tolerance allows users to make mistakes while typing and still find the records they’re looking for on Storyblok’s website. This is done by matching words that are close in spelling. In addition, Algolia allows us to create exceptions in the typo tolerance, an example being technologies Next and Nuxt.
4. Analytics: Algolia provides us with useful analytics on: most search keywords, keywords with no search results, typos, clickthrough rate on searches, etc. This data is extremely important for us as it allows us to follow trends and address user needs.

In addition to using it for Storyblok’s search page, we use Algolia Search for indexing on our Partner Listing, Case Studies, and Developer Tutorials. This allows website users to access search results based on the criteria they sick in seconds instead of having to scroll through pages for hours. If you are interested in how to integrate Algolia with a headless CMS like Storyblok, read this article.

What else is included in Storyblok’s tech stack?

Two more technologies we’d like to point out are Vercel and Crisp. We use Vercel, a Storyblok Technology Partner, to host the script that is synching the content from Storyblok into Algolia. Crisp, a messaging app that lets you chat with your customers, is a technology that helps us stay connected with our users and provide them with the support they need. We use Crisp inside our Storyblok app to support our team.

How do we, at Storyblok, stay connected?

Staying in touch with each other is extremely important as Storyblok is a fully remote company. With the help of Slack, all of us come together in one place to share ideas, make decisions, and move work forward in a very simple and quick manner. It helps us work faster and stay in sync, even though we are all over the world. Moreover, it helps us celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and share exciting news about our work and personal lives. It gives the team the feeling that we are in one big virtual office and never alone!

When it comes to staying connected with our partners and clients, we turn for help from Salesforce. Our sales and partner teams utilize Salesforce as their only source of truth. For the partner team, it helps us facilitate many processes: partner account mapping, recording accomplished activities, following the development path of each partner, etc. It provides us with all the information necessary to build effective relationships with our partners while helping them become more successful with Storyblok. Our sales team uses Salesforce for client outreach as well as to get in touch with potential clients who have requested we contact them through multiple channels so they can find out more about our CMS. Both teams use the platform to communicate with other colleagues on new opportunities or discuss the next steps and strategies for each relationship. Lastly, Salesforce’s analytical tool allows our teams to build dashboards for tracking not only the success of a partner or a client but also our own performance. It helps us evaluate our relationships and plan for the future.

Key Takeaways

As one can tell, Storyblok’s success depends heavily on the help of our Technology Partners. The same applies to our partners, too, as all of us incorporate different technologies into our operations to help us become more agile, efficient, and attractive to our clients. We invite you to check out our Technology Ecosystem to find out more about how our technology partners can help you succeed.