App Integration Software Benefits Every Business Should Know

Ever since the advent of the digital age, companies the world over have been relying on technology for most of their business processes. In the past though, organizations were always skeptical about introducing any workflow software into their business. Fortunately now, times have changed and businesses have realized the importance of adapting to the fast-paced business world.

Back in the day, most entrepreneurs started off on a small scale and digitized only one or two departments. Over time, digitizing every department in the organization became quite inevitable as the competition grew fiercer, which made companies adopt different technologies quite confidently to speed up their operations.

Now the problem with digitizing individual departments this way over time is that they all operate under separate platforms, making it difficult for each of them to work in a coordinated manner toward end goals. Each piece of technology, being owned by different vendors has its own framework of functionality as well, with multiple capabilities.

When you take the perspective of the organization as a whole it can get difficult to sync the efforts of all departments and achieve common objectives with such a method of digitization. Even though the whole point of digitizing departments is to make work easier and faster, their inability to work in a coordinated manner can deceive its entire purpose.

This is where the art of app integration comes into play – a process by which separately operating modules in an organization can be brought together and made to work as a single unit.

App Integration Software Benefits for Businesses

1. Helps Eliminate Data Redundancy

Maintaining separate software solutions for each department leads to the same data being stored multiple times within the company database. As a particular lead or customer progresses through the sales funnel, the data gets handed over and updated several times between the marketing, sales, accounts, and customer service departments. Not only does this type of data routing lead to repetitive and redundant data, but it is also time-consuming and unnecessary. Besides, as the number of leads and customers starts growing higher, it will inevitably lead to errors and mistakes rendering the whole process extremely chaotic and confusing. It can even cause delays in providing customer service.

An app such as ZapUp can help eliminate such redundant data and the errors that follow it, to a great extent. Since it syncs data between applications it helps maintain a centralized database of information pertaining to the customers and leads accessible to all departments.

2. Automates and Speeds Up Processes

App integration software comes with top-notch workflow automation tools as well, with which you can define triggers and actions to create seamless workflows across departments. For example, you can use CRM integration to sync data between your CRM solution and your email marketing solution and set up a drip email message to be sent out to customers that click on a product page on your website.

You could further integrate it with your analytics solution to automatically measure the performance of the drip email campaign and have it send you reports. In the same way, you can integrate the data relating to the same customer even with your customer service department to provide prompt after-sales services as well. Automated messages can be set up for customer inquiries for the times when you are not available online to respond.

All of these are tasks that you would have to repeat time and time again for each new customer. App integration software can completely eliminate the need for such repetition and thus speeds up processes.

3. Improves Agility

Possibly one of the biggest advantages of using app integration software is that it allows you to be more agile and dynamic in your business. Helping your departments coordinate and work together more efficiently, and syncing customer data, helps entrepreneurs be more prepared to respond to opportunities or setbacks as and when they come.

Workflow automation also helps provide better customer experiences leaving less room for dissatisfaction or irate customers. The 360-degree view that it provides into each customer profile helps marketers know and understand their market in a better way thereby enabling them to recognize good opportunities and make decisions quickly. At the same time, it also lets them anticipate crises, market shifts, supply chain disruptions, and other such issues well beforehand to take appropriate action.

4. Eases Accessibility

By syncing and consolidating customer data extracted from different applications in different departments, app integration software provides a single unit of reference for all stakeholders. It allows real-time and complete visibility for team members and thereby improves the accessibility of information. Once again, this type of visibility can be particularly helpful for managers in making quick decisions.

5. Provides Better Cost-efficiency

The conventional method of adopting technology would require individual departments to maintain separate silos of data for their respective uses. An app integration software solution completely eliminates this need and thereby helps cut down on IT costs significantly.

Similarly, with workflow automation in place, app integration helps reduce repetitive tasks as well. Important tasks can be performed with lesser numbers of resources which further brings down the costs.

This way, reducing resource costs and storage costs by a large margin app integration helps achieve better cost efficiency and allows IT professionals to focus on more strategic enhancements for the company.

6. Improves Scalability

As the size of the business grows it becomes more and more difficult to manage the resources and the data being shared. Without a proper channel of data sharing and workflow, there would inevitably be a lot of chaos and confusion leading to poor customer experiences.

App integration software helps streamline communication, data sharing, and workflows across departments. Through these, it makes it much easier for marketers, sales executives, and customer service agents to manage their leads, and queries. A systematic and hassle-free method of handling customer data automatically leaves ample room for scalability and diversification as well. This means that entrepreneurs will have no problem handling more leads and customers when the company starts to scale. Moreover, being cloud-based, these solutions can make it easier for companies to scale even if they have teams scattered geographically.

7. Improves Data Security

In terms of data security, one would think that it is safer to maintain records separately. Attackers may need to take more effort to compromise all of the isolated records. In the case of a centralized system, on the other hand, the attacker can get their hands on all of the data in a single attempt. But not with a high-quality data security system, with multiple layers in place.

You can use a single and powerful security algorithm to protect all of your data. It would also give you better control of all data and make it much easier for you to manage. Having more than one data access point increases data vulnerability as well. With a single centralized database, there are much fewer isolated access points, which further strengthens security.

All You Need to Know About App Integration

Simply put, app integration software is used when you make use of intelligent software to sync and connect multiple applications spanning different departments in an organization in order to work towards common objectives. It is often called enterprise application integration as well and is adopted by almost every new business today – small, medium, or large.

It facilitates the seamless sharing of customer and sales data across departments and allows employees to work as a team without the hassles of manually following up with each other.

It is essentially a piece of technology that acts as a bridge between two or more separate applications. It syncs data between these nodes and enhances workflows allowing each of them to combine their efforts in an efficient way. It makes data available for all stakeholders in a single place and supports real-time updates as well. This means that team members can be working from their own fields of operation and still stay connected with others. Being cloud-hosted, it further allows employees the flexibility to work from anywhere in the world.

ZapUp is one such efficient cloud-based workflow automation software that comes packed with a wide range of features to support the seamless functioning of different applications. It immensely helps increase productivity by automating redundant and repetitive tasks while also creating workflows to connect multiple departments.

It offers a unique drag-and-drop workflow editor with which you can build unlimited complex workflows to make your processes smooth. You can set up app-based triggers and actions to initiate these workflows and perform predefined tasks. You can add your own variations and nodes to enable third-party features as well and customize your processes any which way you want.

As part of its unique AI capabilities, it constantly offers intelligent app suggestions according to your usage, on top of which it provides a set of pre-defined triggers and actions for you to start with. With an easy one-step authentication process you can have fully functioning automated workflows in minutes, spanning multiple applications of your choice. What’s more, from PipeDrive to GitHub to ZenDesk and Google Drive it supports integrations with all of the major and commonly used applications in the world.

How do you Use App Integration?

If your business makes use of several applications to manage different operations such as sales and bookkeeping, then you most definitely need your data to be synced across these operations. Now the data in each of these applications pertain to the same customers and leads brought in by the sales department. However, the type and format of data may be different depending on how each department categorizes the incoming data.

For example, the database in the customer relationships department may include information pertaining to “contacts” or “company names” and the like. At the same time, the bookkeeping department may categorize the same data under “accounts payables” or “expenses” and “clients”.

Now the two departments must work in conjunction to arrive at profits and deliver excellent customer experiences. For this, you need to make use of an efficient app integration software solution and combine the data seamlessly to extract sensible outcomes.

Application integration software like ZapUp can identify common elements across databases and intelligently categorize the data to provide accurate results to queries. You can set up workflows, define triggers and actions and filter the database with relevant criteria. You can also add other applications to share the same data and perform more actions.

This way app integration software helps create a 360-degree view of a customer or lead. It offers data relating to various attributes of the same customer, which essentially leads to an enriched and organized database. Ultimately, it helps provide delightful customer experiences to people and hence impacts the bottom line in a positive way.

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Conclusion

In this day and age, with competition getting tighter by the day, there is a need for companies to be more agile and steadfast with their decisions. Maintaining separate technologies for different aspects of business would only slow you down and hinder your growth. Holistic and all-encompassing solutions are indeed the way to go. Using workflow app like ZapUp can help you scale by leaps and bounds in no time.