10 REASONS WHY SOFTWARE INTEGRATIONS ARE THE KEY TO SaaS SUCCESS

Today, software applications – delivered from the cloud as software-as-a-service (SaaS) – are everywhere. They are cheaper, faster and easier to implement than ever before. They address a myriad of business needs, from the horizontal and generic to the highly specialised and vertical market-aligned.

But how do you make them sustainably successful in a crowded, highly competitive and frankly fickle marketplace? Just think about the number of apps you have installed on your smartphone, tinkered with and then deleted after a few months or even days. The business software marketplace seems to be heading the same way.

Teams and departments acquire functionally specific apps for marketing or sales or project management, and even in the best case they fail to get the best from them. At worst, they wither and die in the cloud, and while the monthly licence fee goes on being paid from an unmonitored company credit card, the actual customer experience is poor and the reputation of the software provider damaged. This is the curse of ‘Spareware’.

There is another way

By offering a range of market recognised and demanded software integrations, SaaS businesses can improve customer satisfaction and retention, enabling faster growth, product expansion and reduced customer churn.

Here’s why;

1. Enhanced functionality: Integrations enable customers to connect the SaaS product with other tools and platforms they already use and value, allowing for seamless data exchange and a more comprehensive solution. This added functionality can increase the overall realisable value of the product.

2. Improved efficiency: Integrations automate tasks and processes by allowing different software applications to work together, leading to increased productivity for customers.

3. Personalized user experience: By integrating with other tools, SaaS products adapt to the unique needs and preferences of individual customers, providing a tailored experience that caters to specific use cases and drives higher adoption and customer satisfaction.

4. Ecosystem benefits: Integrations help create an ecosystem around the SaaS product, making it a more central and indispensable part of the customer’s technology stack. This can result in increased customer loyalty and dependence on the product. At scale, this can be monetised as a ‘marketplace’ of integration capabilities that customers and partners will willingly participate in.

5. Competitive advantage: Offering a wide range of integrations differentiates your SaaS product from its competitors and positions it as a more versatile and flexible solution, which can be an important factor in customer decision-making.

6. Collaboration and cross-functional use: Integrations facilitate better collaboration between teams, functions and businesses by connecting various tools used by different stakeholders, making the SaaS product valuable to the organization, its customers and partners.

7. Reduced switching costs: When a SaaS product is well-integrated with a customer’s existing technology stack, the cost and inconvenience of switching to a different product become higher, making the customer more likely to stick with the current solution.

8. Faster onboarding and adoption: Integrations help customers adopt the SaaS product more quickly and easily by minimizing the need to learn new systems and processes or manually transfer data between tools.

9. Scalability: As a customer’s business grows and their needs evolve, having a range of integrations allows the SaaS product to scale with them, accommodating new tools and use cases over time.

10. Customer feedback and innovation: By listening to customers’ integration requests and needs, SaaS businesses can identify opportunities for improvement and innovation, continually enhancing their product and delivering value to customers.

By addressing your customer pain points and providing a more connected, efficient, and personalized experience, software integrations significantly contribute to customer satisfaction and retention for software and SaaS businesses.

But there is a challenge

Unless you’re able to maintain resource and focus on the engineering front, you need to be more diligent than ever when it comes to determining what projects your developers should be working on. Your developers are most likely focused on:

• Solving the very real engineering challenges involved in building unique and differentiating capabilities into your product or customer-facing platform.
• Keeping your technical debt at a minimum to avoid product roadmap delays and obstacles in future.

Building and maintaining a range of software integrations and the resources required to support it simply doesn’t make sense given those engineering priorities.

In our experience, creating a basic version of an integration takes many weeks/months of dedicated engineering, and because every piece of software is pretty unique you will find it hard to achieve economies of scale as you build additional integrations.

Even then, building a simple integration for what might be a small audience of users is time consuming – whatever the degree of technical difficulty.

That difficulty really hits home when you need integration infrastructure to scale to handle high volumes of requests as your company, platform or partner network grows.

At that point your infrastructure and your team starts struggling with the scale of integration requests, failures and outages will occur, and you’ll need to put development on hold to re-align your strategy and supporting infrastructure to keep developers on board, and most importantly your customers or channel partners happy.

There is a better way…

FuseGenie® is the integration and automation platform that’s rewriting the playbook.

Our technology is designed to connect apps, automate workflows, and supercharge revenue for SaaS, Platform and Provisioning players in technology-forward marketplaces. Our platform is no-code, meaning you won’t need to invest precious product and development resources into learning new platforms.

Our team have run some of the most successful software companies in the UK IT and communications channel. We understand the challenges and opportunities that brings and are passionate about working with businesses that are committed to building high productivity, customer-centric experiences through data-rich integration and automation

With offices in the UK and US, our proven no-code platform connects your apps and automates your workflows at scale, delivering results up to 100x faster than ever before.