How can you leverage your SaaS’s domain experts to help your resource prioritisation?

One crucial way integration technology can help a SaaS with resource prioritisation is by enabling other team members to reduce their reliance on SaaS developers. 

Instead, your domain experts, primely positioned at key areas across your business, can be upskilled to tackle the task directly.

However, the learning process itself takes an enormous personal and company-wide commitment, that may divert focus. So another option is to leverage automation and integration tools. This will enable them to put their knowledge into direct action, leading them to be your own internal citizen integrators. 

Empowering your team to take direct action is one key way that can help your business grow. As well as improve service, experience, and productivity, as well as free up resources for your core product. 

How do Citizen Integrators help your business and resource prioritisation?

Traditionally, IT/development teams are developing the SaaS product but also responding to and building customer integration requests. This often results in long waiting times. As resources are stretched tasks such as integrations are added to prioritisation lists. This could mean depending on the integration, who has requested it or how many use cases it’ll serve may mean it’s at the back of the list. 

Many SaaS organisations don’t realise they have tonnes of domain experts at their fingertips. They are often in product and customer success teams who are familiar with customers, workflows and the data needed. With integration technology, these domain experts don’t need to wait for resources to become available for integration projects to be built. Instead, they can build them themselves. This is because they have used integration technology to upskill. 

As a result, Citizen Integrators not only reduce the burden on IT/development teams. They also enable resources to be prioritised by different teams. For example, developers can stay focused and prioritise core product features and strategic projects. Whereas citizen integrators can focus on and prioritise integration and customer experience. 

Empowering Domain Knowledge to Boost Productivity

So, not only are Citizen Integrators a great way of handling resource prioritisation, but they are also a useful way to boost productivity. 

Data can quickly become bottlenecked and siloed. This results in a lack of information sharing. Due to citizen integrators’ expert knowledge in the specific domain, they are able to build the necessary integrations required to improve the data workflow and boost productivity. As well as expand data access across the organisation which helps remove the friction associated with integration. 

The Areas Where Domain Knowledge Can Take Ownership of Tasks

While developers are typically the ones tasked with delivering the final product, there are areas where they will need to rely on other department’s domain expertise to deliver the desired outcome.

This adds extra friction in the process while sucking in more resources to complete the task at hand.

There are several areas where by removing the need for developer input you will not only improve a process, you will unlock additional resources that can be used elsewhere.

Client Onboarding

The larger the client, the more likely they will be migrating from another (or multiple) system, so thorough data onboarding will be required. The people in your team who will know the most about their requirements will be the people who talk to them directly; namely your Customer Success Team, Solution Architects and your Support team.

They are the ones who will be unpicking and mapping out your customers’ data needs, remodelling them to how your system operates. Even at a high level, this is required so you can accurately identify and place their data in its new home.

Marketing Connectivity Options

It’s no secret that connectivity is becoming an increasingly important buying signal to software users, especially self-service platforms.

Sales and Marketing teams will want to ensure your platform offers the maximum range of connectivity to your target market; opening up options for targeted marketing campaigns, search engine optimization and most importantly keeping your Sales pipeline healthily topped up.

But how can these speculative integrations be created, let alone promoted, without the prioritised resources to deliver first?

Prioritising Product Feature Delivery

Your Product team are the gatekeeper of your roadmap; the firmament between your customers’ wants and C-level commercial needs. While striking this balance they are under pressure to constantly deliver new features and improvements to your users. However, the product doesn’t always get the development resources it needs to keep to the roadmap’s release rhythm. 

While the product team are the ones who know what the users want, they don’t have the tools at their disposal to directly provide it to them.

However, there are solutions to that, especially in the realms of user experience and automation.

Leveraging Integration Technology to Turn Knowledge into Action

The upskilling of existing employees has a direct correlation to employee satisfaction rates. Those who take on new technical skills required to be a citizen integrator with low code and no code tools can feel empowered to accomplish their job. As well as increase their satisfaction and connection to their work. 

Other benefits include:

• A reduction in manual tasks
• Improved project deployment rates
• Easy and quick maintenance
• Improved business agility

What Integration Technology is Out There?

Embedded integration platforms are designed to help SaaS organisations connect their applications to hundreds if not thousands of other apps on behalf of their customers. They also enable the SaaS to be able to build integrations from their product to these connected apps. As a result, they enhance their product with native functionality and help their customers achieve their goals.

All this is achieved without compromising resource prioritisation. As embedded integration platforms have the ability to upskill other employees (like we previously chatted about) with low code. 

Stop compromising on your resources and start prioritising customers with integration technology.