Sam Giggle, MD of Channel sat down with Comms Dealer to discuss the power of enriched integrations.
Why are enriched integrations important?
With increased market competition, delivering value to customers when picking one solution over another has come down to those powerful extras that supplement the core customer requirement of voice, chat, presence, video, and all the other features customers expect. An area we’ve witnessed significant growth in, and our partners are enjoying real success in, is the ability to deliver powerful integrations with UCaaS in a way customers don’t typically enjoy with the majority of market offerings.
Partners are unlocking new revenue streams and dramatically increasing customer stickiness and therefore lifetime value by better enabling the end customer through their UCaaS suite. Our data shows those partners delivering rich integrations to their customers are enjoying longer customer engagements, and feedback from them supports the data.
We have deployed over 20 integrations with other software solutions over the course of the last 12 months, and this work continues at pace. The market demand, which ultimately stems from the end customer, is there for the taking - and our view is the channel is best placed to deliver that alongside its other suite of services.
Key areas for seamless integration
‘Integration’ is a word too frequently bandied around, and partners wanting to enjoy real success with integrations need to focus their attention on a handful of crucial areas to really drive that customer adoption curve. Ultimately, once you know you can integrate with something the customer already uses, the key questions are ‘how rich can you make the integration?’ and ‘how easy and quick is it to set up?’.
The market is awash with solutions where integrations are cumbersome, feature poor, unreliable over time, and complicated to set up in the first place. Partners are telling us that something they can rapidly deploy to customers is core to getting that agreement to proceed in the first place, and ‘one click’ or ‘no code’ integrations are a huge enabler for them. We’ve worked with other software vendors and solutions from Vincere, to Slack, to PowerBI in order to integrate CallSwitch One seamlessly. From within their dashboard customers (or partners on their behalf) can instantly choose the integrations they want to use, click to login and authenticate, and they’re live. For the partner, this approach avoids spending time manually integrating with other platforms, removes specialist knowledge requirements, and is highly cost-effective.
Catering to niche market verticals
We’re also witnessing an increasing number of partners differentiating from their competitors by specialising in niche vertical markets - from dentistry, to property, to recruitment and more. And while we’re always evaluating CRMs, data suites, and other software where there’s a valuable integration, much of our integration roadmap is now influenced by partners approaching us with business cases and asking us to build integrations between our platform and the other software products their core to their customer markets. This can represent a huge value-add that customers are willing to pay for, given the productivity enhancements they can achieve.These clear business cases have enabled us to be highly focussed in our development approach, and is a workstream we already have a healthy roadmap for taking us into 2025.
