A day in the life of developer support at GoCardless

Who am I?

I’m Nicola Pellatt and I work in the Developer Support team at GoCardless. I support merchants and partners who are building integrations using our API. My team also provides support to the rest of the company on more technical internal issues. I’ve been working here for a year and two months now - so I recently celebrated my first GoCardless birthday (and got a lovely bottle of champagne)!

What does my typical day look like?

Unlike Sam in Design and Ahmed in Legal, my typical day doesn’t start with exercise! I get into the office at around 9am and the first thing I do is grab a bagel and a cup of tea. It's always the same combination as I’m a creature of habit, but I do like to buck the office trend of coffee. That also means I don’t have to queue for the busy coffee machine!

After grabbing breakfast I catch up with the team and read my emails, check my calendar and see what I’ve got planned for the day. I’ll then start working through the API inbox, responding to any questions from merchants or partners, such as error messages. We also field various internal requests, mainly from support, sales and partnerships, but they can come from anyone in the company.

We don't get many phone calls, and we find it easier to handle API queries by emails, as this involves looking at the logs, screenshots, and so on, which is hard to do over the phone. All requests are tagged with an ID, so we can easily identify them and follow their progress. Our goal is to reach inbox zero every day!

The inbox is generally my only everyday task, because we also do a lot of ad-hoc stuff. For example, we might jump on a sales call to help explain what our API can do to a potential customer, or perhaps join the sales team at a meeting in the office.

We also run API training sessions for the majority of new joiners, mostly in sales and sometimes marketing. I recently did a training session for support, to refresh their API knowledge.

My background is in customer support, where I spent nine months before moving to developer support. I’ve got a degree in French, which isn’t super-technical, but I’ve always been interested in technology. Our API is constantly being updated and there’s always more to learn about it.

The support teams often have lunch together. We get the support favourite, Bombay Burrito, without fail every Friday! Afternoons tend to be when we schedule calls and training sessions.

What do I enjoy most about working at GoCardless?

There are so many things! Firstly, the other people in support. We all get on really well and they make it fun to come to work. Everyone here is super driven and intelligent, and works so hard to keep the company going in the right direction - which makes for a great work environment.

Every day is different at GoCardless. Even though the foundation of my job is emails, there are always lots of side projects to get involved in. Right now I’m writing an FAQs document for our API, which is an internal resource for support and sales to use during calls with prospects and merchants. I’m also working on a project to create how-to videos for the dashboard, which showcase everything our dashboard can do.

What are some of the challenges in my daily work?

I’d say the biggest challenge is trying to learn as much as I can about GoCardless and the API. It’s a complex product and the API is constantly developing. Working here is very much about learning on the job - we get so many emails about things we’ve not seen before. It’s about learning new things along the way as you solve the problems.