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:
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.
Marc Andreessen, Wall Street Journal, 2011
Today, every business depends on software to run, improve and grow.
Accounting, design, sales. manufacturing, logistics, marketing, training, compliance, HR, all use software applications to achieve their goals.
Some applications are universal like email or spreadsheets, while others are closely targeted on the needs of very specific customers like dentists, insurance brokers or yoga instructors.
In such a software-dependent, fast-moving and interconnected world there is increasing demand for software apps to integrate with each other, across teams and between businesses.
For example, why shouldn’t a new visitor to your website be able to schedule time directly in the relevant salespersons calendar, have that logged in your CRM system while automatically triggering a nurturing email campaign in your marketing automation and having a summary of that whole engagement published on your Sales team’s collaboration and messaging channel?
When software is better integrated it speeds innovation, accelerates time to revenue for new products, improves the customer experience and reduces friction and latency in our business processes.
BUT – the proliferation of software has not been based on consistent design and development practices, instead offering a complex environment of competing and conflicting standards, interfaces and data that presents significant obstacles to integration and the benefits it can deliver.
With the explosion of software applications, building and maintaining integrations continues to be a mission-critical challenge for technology companies such as SaaS providers, platform businesses, marketplaces and others that require automation and integration.
To meet these demands, Technology companies resort to traditional strategies:
Building integrations with their in-house development resources, outsourcing to different contractors, or sending their users to third-party tools.
But these strategies pose critical challenges:
All of this leads to wasted development time and a poor customer experience.
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 between 10-100x faster than ever before.
Our seamless integration allows your app to integrate and automate data with the many different applications that your customers use. This not only delights your customers and provides an opportunity for monetization, but also reduces churn, gives you a true competitor advantage, and enhances brand loyalty.
Powering Your Partnerships
We know you are faced with valuable integration and automation opportunities in your customers and partners but at the same time its difficult to find and redirect resources to address these. Our platform is the intelligent glue between you and your partners, managing integration updates and support on behalf of all parties. By leveraging our platform, you can develop new business relationships and revenue streams.
Automate any API
Our platform allows you to automate anything from customer experiences to internal team processes or syncing data between different applications. Our flexible technology makes it easy for you to streamline your workflows and conserve precious product and development resources. Our team takes care of all the integrations, automations, and data flows for you, resulting in a 10-100x faster route to market with unrivalled white-glove support.
Embed 100+ applications inside your platform with our pre-built connectors
It’s not hard to get started with FuseGenie® . Right off the cloud, we provide access to over 100 of the most popular SaaS applications with the ability to scale, customise and monetise any combination of the leading business applications that are powering todays businesses. This happens right inside your existing platform with just a few clicks.
Gain insights into feature usage with analytics
Integrating applications is one thing. Knowing how those integrations are actually being used is another – and creates even more value in your applications portfolio. FuseGenie® offers unique insight into the ways that your software integrations are being deployed and adopted, providing the opportunity to improve and expand your offerings and increase customer and partner stickiness.
‘Even when you know how it works, it still looks like magic.’
At FuseGenie® , we complement our platform with our signature magic.
We understand the unique challenges of building a technology-forward, software-dependent business.
We take pride in delivering an unparalleled experience from start to finish. Our team is dedicated to ensuring that you receive the highest quality service and support.
We recognise that your business is unique, which is why we provide a tailored solution that meets your specific needs.
When you are faced with the inevitable challenge of integrating the software applications you and your customers, partners and people depend on, don’t let it eat you up.