Nowadays, SaaS companies have to be ready to offer add-ons to their product, and many of them started having this approach to improve their customer satisfaction. Why? Because customers are looking for products that include integrations with their preferred cloud applications.
You might already have some sort of native integration within your SaaS company, but, if you want to keep growing and be one of the first options in the market, you need to create as many product solutions as you can to maintain good visibility in the market. To do so, you should have a fluid integration experience to decide what kind of integrations will bring more benefits to your clients.
Whether you build an in-house integration or choose to buy a third-party integration platform (iPaaS), think about how you will retain the existing customers and expand the product’s reach to fulfill the buyer’s requirements.
Although building native integrations allows you to get full control of your customers’ data to develop a tailored product, there are certain things that you should know before hand. Let’s start by addressing what’s a native integration and how it should be or not the best option for your SaaS.
What does Native Integration Mean?
Users cannot distinguish where an app ends and an integration begins since a native integration extends the functionality of the app.
Some people limit native integrations to those created for or included in your app utilizing internal development tools. Others describe them as the API connections between two systems. However, it doesn’t matter if you use internal resources, external resources, APIs, or whatever else. The native integration is viewed as a feature by the user of your program.
Native integrations allow you, to control and monitor every step of the integration lifecycle and help to get a better APIs’ performance.
Also, for further improvement of the user installation and integration management, the user interface of a native integration can be customized within any system.
Three Benefits of Native Integration.
It gives you full access to customers’ data and interactions between APIs.
Native integrations allow companies to have control around their integrations, including when, how, and under what circumstances data is sent. Native integrations, which are only regulated by yours and the partners’ APIs, offer the flexibility to configure workflows exactly as the organization’s clients require.
As native integrations are (usually) a direct connection between APIs, they allow you and/or your partner to have full access to customers’ activity for getting a fresh perspective on what its customers use their product for, and they also give you fast communication in case any system error has occurred.
Reduce competition by partnering with other SaaS companies.
SaaS companies have a deeper understanding of the product and the connections between their products when they engage directly with partners APIs. Building and innovating together strengthens partnerships with integration partners.
Customers’ satisfaction enhances the relationship between partners because they are more committed to each other’s brands which allow them to have more successful marketing initiatives.
Build an ideal product for your prospects and clients.
If your customers are happy, your company will show the results. When you build the right product for your clients, they will keep their loyalty and get stick with your software product. By doing that, your SaaS will become a Software Ecosystem.
Today, user experience is a huuuge part of companies providing a service, especially for SaaS companies. Being said so, the agility of solving issues within your software is crucial for customer retention and for offering great functionality. Otherwise, your company might lose validation in the market and this, my friend, is hard to recover. That’s why it’s important to have control of activity exposure, flexibility, and a technological setup that only comes with native integrations.
The Obstacles of Working with Native Integrations.
Now that we talked about the plus of native integrations, is time to expose their downside. But don’t worry. I won’t scare or confuse you with big consequences of working with this kind of integration. This is just to help you evaluate the pros and cons of using native integrations.
More and more increment in technical resources.
Providing a tailored product for your customers will come with unique code creations that can only be solved internally.
In-house integrations can take a lot of energy from your technical employees as they will have a hard time choosing between maintaining integrations or working with the main product. So, if you’re using native integrations, evaluate how much your company is growing and how much the cost in resources will be to maintain or improve your product development process.
Low adaptability
As your SaaS company is growing, you need to build more integrations to add more features to your services, but building more native integrations means stealing time for developing a better product. Efficiency might not relate to native integrations unless you get iPaaS support. It takes time to build and is difficult to balance with the growing demand.
The reality is that native integrations are good for your business. Whether you build them in-house or buy an embedded iPaaS depends on what stage your company is, what’s your SaaS integration strategy to approach your target group, and how sustainable they are by adding efficiency and quality to your service.
