API and Integration Connections for a Seamless Customer Experience

“The hip bone connects to the thigh bone...” as the song goes, but unfortunately it’s not always that simple when it comes to connecting all your business software (especially through APIs).

From a customer perspective, it’s not hard to understand how we’ve gotten really used to organisations having great integrations and a lot of value available for free, “out of the box”. Behind this are intelligent developers who wrote the connections we now get to take for granted. But this is now the world we live in. We log into Amazon and it knows what we ordered, what we browsed, suggests items we didn’t know we needed (I swear, I do need those fancy cable organisers…) and guides the user experience so flawlessly it’s become normal.

When reviewing your software architecture, by default you’ll likely have the same expectations. When platforms don’t “auto-magically” talk to each other it will feel jarring and you’ll probably curse whoever built it.

So how do you know if your programs will integrate to create a seamless experience for both you and your customers? How do you know if they should integrate at all?

Well, it’s a good question and one that most growing companies face. There are two distinct ways to approach it - Out-of-the-box vs Bespoke

Out-of-the-box

This means there is something already in your platform that handles the connection or something you can easily subscribe to that just “plugs in”.

This is where you’re both lucky and smart. Lucky because someone already built a connector and smart because you probably chose well when selecting your core platforms if pre-built connectors already exist.

If you’re using a simple/cheap platform at $2 per user per month, chances are your options are limited. Don’t get me wrong, there are some really cool platforms with a lot of cool kit at great prices, but when you start wanting to customize your business processes and customer service experience you’re going to rapidly find out that you do “get what you paid for” when it comes to software platforms.

If you’re on something more full-featured, your software investment and operating costs are going to be higher at a baseline but you probably have far more options. For example, Salesforce App Exchange has literally thousands of existing apps and integrations you can plug-and-play, many of them free.

Bespoke

This means you have to build something specific for your platform or your needs. There aren’t existing connectors or there are but they don’t do what you need.

So how and why pick one over the other?

One way to work out the best investment of your time, money and personnel is to create an ROI strategy. From my point of view, this is purely and simply a matter of doing the work, crunching the numbers and making the decision for what is going to give you the result you need.

An example could be:

Let's say you have your core CRM and sales processes already built on Salesforce and you have Xero as an accounting package. That’s awesome, because there are lots of other people just like you who have done the same, so there are existing packages that handle this well and they mostly only have to be installed and set up.

But what about a situation where you have a specific need where you should only invoice in a specific way and you can’t find an existing package that will tick the boxes?

Well, to be honest I’d ask how many invoices a month you’re going to be issuing and how time consuming is it to create them. If you’re a company that works with a small number of customers with a small number of invoices at high amounts, maybe aggregating the source information you want with a Salesforce Report and then having someone manually create the invoices once a month is more cost-effective. Sure, it’s annoying and I’d probably complain every month if I had to do it too. But building a custom integration for 6-8 weeks development would take years to pay for itself, so personally I’d suck it up and do the manual process.

On the other hand, maybe you issue thousands of invoices a month and it would take a full-time staff member weeks to create them. You can calculate the cost of your staff and other resources and work out that the 6-8 weeks development repays itself in 3 months of saved wages and therefore makes VERY good sense.

You may also consider a hybrid option, where you use an existing connector/application and then have someone come do a smaller amount of custom work to tie the two together. Now you’ve got the best of both worlds, you’ve got your information flowing smoothly and you’ve got your weird/custom use-case nicely handled, and within a reasonable expense.

A Finishing Thought 

When it comes to questions like these, you probably know your business requirements and processes inside out, but not everyone knows the options or best-practices when it comes to software or software architecture. It might be worth reaching out to an expert for a consult every now and again and leaning on their experience to help navigate questions like the above, defining what will be the best and most rewarding outcomes for you and your business.

Want to connect your CRM with other online applications to achieve unified, synchronous business systems? Or looking for help in deciding in the first place?

SolArch is a boutique Salesforce development company focused on top-level technical advisory, architecture, execution and nimble support. We are based in Australia with onshore resources, servicing clients in Australia and further afield including New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States.

Learn more today by emailing daniel@solarch.us or send a private message via LinkedIn.