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Imagine your team struggling to locate crucial data, bouncing between countless apps, and wasting valuable time. The result?
- Missed opportunities
- Reduced productivity
- A strain on your bottom line
In today’s world, companies use more than 130 SaaS applications. If not connected or organized properly, switching from one app to another is sure to cause mayhem, impacting your bottomline revenue.
This is where SaaS integrations step in to save the day.
By seamlessly connecting your applications, SaaS integrations ensure smooth data transfers and automatic synchronization, helping your team work smarter, not harder. While the benefits are clear, the road to effective integration isn’t without its challenges. Plus, selecting the right integration approach is essential for building efficient workflows and enhancing the overall user experience. SaaS integration helps you make the most of your SaaS applications through data transfers and automatic synchronization.
In this guide, we'll explore how SaaS integrations can transform your business operations, the common hurdles you might face, and the best strategies to create a cohesive, streamlined workflow that maximizes your SaaS investment.
Let’s discuss this in detail.
What is SaaS Integration?
SaaS integration involves connecting various SaaS applications via APIs to facilitate data exchange between them.
For example, let’s say you integrate marketing automation and CRM software. Each time you update the marketing platform data, it flows automatically to the CRM system.
SaaS integration is critical for businesses using multiple SaaS applications. It enables them to automate workflows and facilitate seamless communication between cloud or on-prem applications. This allows businesses to exchange data effectively and improve business efficiency.
Benefits of using SaaS Integrations
Now that you know what SaaS integration is, here’s how SaaS integrations can benefit your teams and the company as a whole:
Streamlined Workflow
SaaS integrations eliminate data silos. They integrate data scattered across systems and provide a single source of truth, enhancing data accessibility. They ensure that applications run together seamlessly via automation, reducing manual processes.
For instance, Saleshandy’s sales team faced challenges streamlining and managing workflows effectively. This created inefficiencies and increased the risk of customer churn. With the help of Cobalt, the company combined multiple tools and enhanced the customer experience by using SaaS integrations. As a result, it also improved customer retention and acquisition rates.
Data Accuracy
SaaS integrations automate data transfers and reduce the requirement for manual entries. As a result, they reduce the risk of human error and ensure accuracy.
For instance, integrating an e-commerce store with inventory management automatically updates inventory in real-time to ensure accurate stock levels and prevent overselling.
Improved Productivity
SaaS integrations automate manual processes, allowing teams to focus on more strategic and valuable tasks. Moreover, teams can find the information they need in a centralized system, saving them the time spent searching for information across multiple systems.
Enhanced Customer Experience
SaaS integrations centralize and make customer data more accessible for marketing and sales teams to personalize customer experiences.
For instance, integrated CRM software centralizes and analyzes customer data, helping you gain insights into their needs and preferences. This helps companies understand customers better and provide them with tailored experiences.
Scalability
With SaaS integrations, applications can handle increased data and user demands without affecting performance. You can independently add, remove, or upgrade components according to evolving business needs.
For instance, startups can initially use a basic email marketing tool and integrate it with a robust CRM system as they grow. This will help them create more targeted campaigns and offer better customer experiences without disrupting the existing processes.
Cobalt’s flexible integration capabilities and 200+ pre-built integrations helped Air.ai, a conversational AI software, scale integrations with various CRM applications while streamlining workflows for their clients.
Challenges in SaaS Integration
Whether you are integrating internal applications or offering integrations between your product and the SaaS tools your clients use, certain challenges are associated with them.
Here are a few of them:
- Development Roadblocks
Building custom connections for SaaS integrations is complex and time-consuming. It requires technical expertise, multiple trials and errors, iterations, testing, and manual workarounds. - Vendor Limitations
SaaS integration platforms offer different levels of API capabilities and support. If there are data access limitations or vendor lock-ins, it may be challenging for businesses to integrate apps and ensure the stability of the integrated systems. - Troubleshoot Broken Integrations
Regardless of the data load, SaaS integrations eventually break. Identifying the root cause of the broken integrations and fixing issues before they affect employees and users is complex and time-consuming.
Pro-tip: Use Cobalt to identify and troubleshoot integration issues. Our dashboard lists the failures in detail to make troubleshooting quicker and easier. - Performance Issues
The speed and reliability of data transfers between applications are critical to ensuring a seamless user experience. As data volume increases, there may be issues with real-time data sync or network problems.
Using monitoring tools to identify issues and fix them proactively is necessary to maintain SaaS integrations. - Data Security
If SaaS integration platforms lack robust security features, they may raise security concerns.
To avoid security issues, adopt advanced data security measures like two-factor authentication, firewalls, encryption, and monitoring tools.
How do I integrate SaaS applications?
APIs facilitate SaaS integrations.
Here's how they help:
- Reduce the need for extensive technical expertise
- Ensure secure data transfer between applications using established protocols
While most SaaS applications have pre-built triggers to activate APIs and carry out actions like updating employee databases based on hiring activities, specific situations require additional programming for streamlining operations.
Here are the SaaS integration approaches you can leverage to connect SaaS applications. Evaluate the approaches and choose the one that best fits your business.
SaaS Integration using traditional iPaaS
iPaaS, or integration platforms as a service, offer pre-built pathways between applications to streamline integration. These platforms have no-code integration capabilities that save you from building integrations from scratch.
iPaaS provides the infrastructure to build connections and implement the applications. Once the parameters for the connection types are set within the platform, the iPaaS creates a centralized system to create, view, and manage data, operations, and infrastructure. You can, thus, update products and share information easily with stakeholders.
How does iPaaS work?
iPaaS for individual users
Individual users utilize iPaaS to interconnect their internal tools and streamline their workflow. It addresses situations where the software they rely on lacks native integrations or the existing ones don't cater to their specific needs. iPaaS offers a solution that enables users to integrate their tools effectively, tailored precisely to their requirements.
Example: Suppose you are a salesperson, and you want to get a Slack notification every time someone sends mail to you. If your email app doesn't have this feature, you can use an iPaaS to set it up.
iPaaS for B2B Partner:
B2B partners utilize iPaaS to integrate the company’s software with other tools to streamline their employee's workflow. The SaaS company builds a connector for their app and publishes it on the iPaaS platform. Their customers then use the iPaaS to create automation involving the SaaS company's app.
Example: A CRM software company might create a connector for their app on an iPaaS platform. Their customers can then use the iPaaS to set up workflows that integrate the CRM with other tools, like email marketing software or project management apps.
Examples of iPaaS
Popular platforms like Zapier, Workato, and Tray. These are iPaaS platforms, used by both individual users and B2B partners for integration.
SaaS Integration using Embedded iPaaS
This approach involves building custom connections between systems and SaaS applications. Simply put, it means getting your software engineers to build, monitor, and maintain integrations.
While this method is time-consuming and requires a heavy investment, it offers great flexibility. This approach is most suitable when you need specific functionalities beyond the standard SaaS integrations offered by different platforms.
How does embedded iPaaS work?
The way it works is simple: When a client integrates their CRM (like Salesforce) with your product via an embedded iPaaS, they can set up workflows where any changes in the CRM—such as adding, modifying, or removing a contact—automatically reflect in your product.
This setup involves linking the CRM to your system, defining actions in an intuitive workflow builder, and using conditional logic for various scenarios. The embedded iPaaS ensures real-time data synchronization, provides monitoring tools, and delivers a seamless, native-like integration experience, ultimately saving time, reducing errors, and enhancing operational efficiency.
Example of embedded iPaaS
The embedded iPaaS market is much less crowded compared to the iPaaS market, primarily because iPaaS solutions have been around for much longer. Generally, there are two types of embedded iPaaS solutions:
- Larger companies that offer both embedded iPaaS and iPaaS solutions: include Tray.io, Workato, and Boomi.
- Smaller companies that focus solely on embedded iPaaS: Examples include Cobalt, Prismatic, and Paragon.
SaaS Integration using RPA
RPA, or Robotic Process Automation, employs scripts or bots to automate data collection and sync between internal systems and SaaS applications. Leveraging AI within the system saves time and increases process efficiency. This approach is ideal when SaaS applications do not offer APIs for the data you need to gather or synchronize.
Though this approach saves time, it requires technical expertise to set up the bots. Also, the system demands continuous monitoring and maintenance, as simple UI changes may break the bots. So, adopting this approach requires understanding the workflows and then integrating SaaS applications using AI automations.
SaaS Integration using Unified API
The unified API approach is an innovative solution to the complexities of integrating multiple SaaS applications. Instead of juggling numerous individual APIs, each with its own documentation, authentication, and data structures, a unified API consolidates these disparate interfaces into one streamlined connection. This approach offers a more efficient and simplified way to connect various SaaS platforms.
How Unified APIs Work
A unified API acts as a single gateway that connects to multiple SaaS applications. It abstracts the differences between individual APIs, providing a standardized interface for developers to interact with. When you need to integrate with multiple services—whether it’s
The unified API handles the heavy lifting by translating your requests and responses into the appropriate formats for each application.
Examples of unified API
Popular unified API platforms are Merge, API Deck, and Cobalt.
In Conclusion
SaaS integrations make life easier. They make data available and accessible to stakeholders, ensuring streamlined workflows, improved efficiency, and enhanced customer experience.
Having said that, your approach to SaaS integrations depends on what applications you want to connect, your goals, and your resources.
With Cobalt, you can build native integrations with AI in a few minutes. We offer 200+ pre-built integrations and enable the integration of several SaaS applications using one API. Thus, you can connect applications across categories, like
can be done easily without troubling your engineers.
Want to learn more about the Cobalt platform? Schedule a demo now!