It is time for a short story, and this one is about a SaaS. A SaaS who goes on a journey to discover embedded integration technology and how it can help overcome their integration woes, become sticky and reduce churn.
What is a SaaS?
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software distribution model where applications are hosted by a third-party provider and accessed by users over the Internet. Unlike traditional software, which requires installation on individual devices, SaaS allows users to access applications through a web browser or app interface. Users typically pay a subscription fee for access to the software, which is maintained and updated by the provider. SaaS offers advantages such as scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, making it popular for businesses and individuals seeking accessible and efficient software solutions without the need for extensive infrastructure or maintenance.
An Integration Tale As Old as Time
Once upon a time, there was a SaaS, more specifically an email marketing SaaS. They built their application so they can bring together customer’s business data to enable them to provide timely and relevant messaging to their customers.
They always try to help their customers nurture and grow their audience with powerful marketing automation. In the hope it makes meaningful conversation happen. While making their SaaS sticky. Yet they started to see a decrease in daily active users, in other words, an increase in disappearing customers.
They hunted down what was making customers vanish and discovered the integration orge. In other words, the challenge of developing integrations quickly and efficiently.
Integration Woes No Matter What Way They Turn
At first, they tried to solve the integration issue by building and managing in-house integrations. However, these integrations would often involve manual processes that took up valuable time. Not only that their developers couldn’t keep up with the workload. The integrations suffered as well as the core product features.
Instead, they turned to a third-party integration provider (iPaaS). They instructed the provider to help manage key pieces of information for their users. But disaster struck when it turned out to be a heavy load on the customers (an active role in the integration process such as a separate account with the integration provider). As well as not being able to achieve the dynamic two-way integrations their customers needed. This fractured the seamless integration experience the email marketing SaaS had dreamed of.
Ultimately, due to their inability to develop in-house integrations quickly enough and the poor third-party integration experience they saw an ever bigger customer departure. This sudden increase in churn meant they needed to find a solution and fast.
They sent their best developers and product managers out to search high and low for a solution. Their aim was to return with a solution that would help their SaaS develop integrations without compromising the customer experience and make their SaaS sticky once again. They wondered if such a product existed, but fortunately, one developer stumbled upon, Why should you use an Embedded Integration Platform? And how to make the most of it which presented promising results.
An Integration Hero Emerges
Their prayers were answered when they came across the term embedded iPaaS. It was first coined by Cyclr, an embedded integration technology that enables the creation of hundreds of integrations, saving SaaS organisations thousands of hours of wasted human capital.
This type of integration technology is embedded within your own SaaS application. It can provide all the integration functionality required, it doesn’t add to the integration backlog (phew, yes that was a collective phew from your developers), and it doesn’t require customers to have individual accounts.
This is because it’s within your SaaS, nestled in there with your SaaS styling and keeping your customers close.
Creating Integration Stickiness Together
By utilising embedded integration technology such as Cyclr, SaaS organisations join a partnership where the two work harmoniously together to achieve your integration goals, increase product stickiness and reduce churn.
For instance, our email marketing SaaS was able to utilise embedded integration technology to expand its 25 in-house integrations to a whooping 35 and growing. They can achieve this quicker and with a much lower overhead.
Now the SaaS doesn’t need to send users off to a separate iPaaS provider to install integrations. As a result, friction is reduced, experience improved and the SaaS is stickier.
An embedded integration solution can also help the SaaS achieve:
- Improved time-to-market
- Continuous problem-solving for recurring problems
- Minimisation of the integration setup
- Elimination of repetitive work with the power of efficient automation
- Decrease the integration backlog for developers
So, to sum up, an embedded solution enhances a SaaS product expands the native integration library and puts connectivity at the centre of the SaaS.
Those who opt for in-house and third-party integrations need to understand that their users will have to have an active role in the API integration management process. This will have an impact on your customers. Whereas with an embedded option this is removed and things are kept simple for your users.
Not only do embedded solutions keep things easier for your users they make scaling easy for you too! This is because they are designed to expand with you as you go from a small startup to a large enterprise.
A slick, value-add solution that can accelerate the development of your platform integrations, retain customers and create a sticky SaaS.
A Beautiful Integrated Ending
All in all their wish came true, they are now able to build integrations without overloading their developers. Yet still make their product sticky and retain customers because they now have the embedded integration technology to meet integration demand.
Embedded integration technology such as Cyclr, are determined to help SaaS companies reduce time spent building integrations and get them back on track to developing their core product. Leave the integration stuff to the experts.
Want your own beautiful integration ending?
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