Debug user issues with new enhancements to Institution Status

Our commitment to building a better customer experience includes everything from enhancing the quality of Plaid’s APIs that you use on a daily basis, to building essential tools that can help you better support your users in a self-serve way. Over the past quarter, we’ve spoken with many of you to understand what key data points and insights would better enable you to troubleshoot your integration. 

Based on your feedback, we’re introducing new metrics to Institution Status to help you debug user issues more quickly and efficiently. These enhancements give you historical and client-specific views of institution health directly in the Dashboard—so you have data-driven insights readily available to help support your users. 

Historical view of institution health 

We initially built Institution Status to give you an easy way to view an institution’s connectivity in real-time. But we heard from you that to better troubleshoot user issues, you need to have a more complete view of an institution’s health, to pinpoint issues at a specific point in time. With this feedback in mind, we’ve added a new graphical view to each institution’s individual Status page to show you their connection health over the past 2 weeks. The new view highlights the percentage of Item add successes for all products across Plaid globally.

It's so handy to see if a connection issue was due to just a short period of downtime. Not only does that save a ticket from being submitted, it provides a better experience for our users and our Support specialists.
- Jannelle Worrell, Technical Support Manager at You Need A Budget

Insight into transaction data freshness

Access to timely consumer-permissioned data is essential to helping people manage their finances. In fact, many people have come to expect that the apps they’re using are regularly updated to reflect their account activity, from credit card spend to payroll deposits. Specifically for customers using our Transactions API, we often hear that more visibility into the update frequency of Plaid Items would go a long way in enabling their support teams to help app users—especially when they ask, “Why don’t I see my most recent transactions yet?”

With this in mind, we are providing you with even more transparency into how often transactions are being retrieved for each institution. Now, on each institution’s individual status page, we’ll show a personalized chart that reflects the percentage of your Items (transactions retrieved by Plaid) that have been updated over a specific time interval. The update frequency for transaction data can vary, depending on the institution–and having a more granular view can empower your support teams to better manage expectations and make decisions in real-time to help your users.

I really like the data freshness breakdown. It helps give us an idea of whether we can expect delayed transactions issues and communicate accordingly.
- Jannelle Worrell, Technical Support Manager at You Need A Budget

The chart displayed within the Dashboard will be based on your total Item count, for Items that are in a healthy state and eligible for updates. You will need to have 25 or more Items per institution to see the data freshness metrics for that particular institution. 

Getting started

To see these new enhancements, head over to the Status page in the Dashboard, and click on an institution’s individual page.

We’d also love to hear from you! What else can we do to help you better troubleshoot your integration? Let us know at @PlaidDev.