In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, integrations and automation are vital for any SaaS company’s success. Customers expect your tool to integrate seamlessly with the systems they already use. If your product doesn’t fit into their existing ecosystem, they’ll likely move on to a competitor.
Why Are Integrations Important?
Integrations are more than just a checkbox for potential customers. By connecting your SaaS product with other essential tools and services, integrations transform it into a centralized productivity hub that becomes indispensable to users’ workflows. Integrations help to
- Eliminate Redundant Efforts: By bridging data silos through integrations, your tool ensures that information flows in an automated manner, saving customers time and effort enter the same data again in your system.
- Unlock Hidden Insights: When different systems contribute unique data points, combining them can reveal transformative insights. Integrations enable your platform to harness this potential and provide unparalleled value to users.
- Streamline Workflows with Automation: Users love tools that simplify their lives. By enabling your platform to interact with others and automate repetitive tasks, you reduce manual effort, making your tool indispensable.
- Deliver a Unified Experience: Nobody enjoys juggling multiple apps. A well-integrated platform allows users to manage their tasks centrally, offering a smooth and cohesive user experience that keeps them coming back.
In this guide, we’ll focus specifically on building integrations to pull data from other platforms. Whether you’re building an integration to fetch employee data from an HRMS, User & Application data from a Single Sign On System, Payment & transactions from an accounting system, Contracts or purchase orders from a contract lifecycle management system this article should help you. We have not covered integrations with other integration platforms like Zapier / Workato here. As they are not sources of data but executors of workflows. That calls for a separate discussion.
Steps to Build Robust Integrations
1. Identify the Data Points to Fetch
Start by defining the exact data you want to retrieve. Different SaaS Applications have different data points. Identifying the data points that you wish to fetch are first step of building an integration. Based on the type of SaaS application you are integrating with and your core offering, the data points will vary.
Here are a few examples of categories of SaaS applications and types of data points you might want to fetch.
Having clear requirements ensures you know what endpoints to look for in the target system’s API.
2. Explore the APIs
The next step is to find the API endpoints to integrate.
- Research the API documentation to find the right endpoints, query parameters, scope requirements & data formats.
- You can use tools like Postman to test API endpoints and confirm they meet your needs.
Many SaaS Platforms have extensive API documentation which helps in understanding & testing the APIs. Below is a screenshot of Slack API documentation, Which clearly lists the endpoint, the scopes, the sample codes, and a way to test the API.
3. Find the Authentication Method
Once you have found the endpoints to call, the Next step is to figure out the authentication method. Here are the popular authentication methods currently.
- OAuth: OAuth (Open Authorization) is an open standard protocol that allows secure, token-based authorization for accessing resources on behalf of a user without exposing their credentials.
- API Key: A simple token provided by the service.
- Username & Password: Less common but still used in legacy systems.
- JWT (JSON Web Tokens): A JSON Web Token (JWT) is a compact, self-contained, and digitally signed JSON object that securely transmits information between two parties.
Some applications might offer multiple ways of authentication also. You may choose the authentication that is more secure and gives the end users more control over the permissions they have to grant to connect the application to your application.
4. Encrypt & Secure the Credentials
Access Tokens & API Keys are sensitive information that have to be protected through encryption in secret vaults.
- Use encryption and vault solutions like HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Azure Key Vault.
- Avoid storing sensitive data in your database.
5. Map Fields and Build a Data Pipeline
The next step is to process the data. Before that, you will need to create a map between the keys present in the API response with data points that you want to store in the database and present in the platform.
For example, One SaaS application’s API might have a key called ‘email’ denoting the email of the user, and Another SaaS application’s API might send the email of the user in a key called ‘emailid’, Your system needs to understand that both these keys mean ‘email of the user’ and process it as that. Maintaining an integration-specific mapping also simplifies the downstream data processing. Once you have mapped integration-specific keys to your own data points, You can build a generic data pipeline which applies for multiple integrations.
6. Decide the Sync Frequency
Another important step is to understand how frequently you wish to fetch the data. This can be defined based on your use case and the server resources that you wish to spend on integration syncs.
Syncs can be triggered on schedule or on events. You could also choose to have different types of syncs for different data types. Here is an example of different sync durations for different data types that BetterCloud has implemented.
7. Test and Deploy the Integration
Testing is critical to ensure reliability: You can perform the following tests to make sure that integration will work reliably always.
- Unit Testing: Validate individual components of the integration.
- End-to-End Testing: Simulate real-world flow i.e. the flow the end user will go through to connect the integration and see the data fetched from integration in the platform
- Load Testing: Test performance under a high volume of data inflow.
- Rate limits: Different APIs come with different rate limits. Rate limits could be enforced per API Key/Token or your own server IP. Understanding rate limits and implementing mechanisms to operate within rate limits are important to make sure that the integration works reliably always. A few ways you and avoid rate limits are fetching incremental data, and having some delays between two consecutive API calls.
8. Monitor and Maintain the Integration
Once live, continuously monitor the integration:
- Logging: Track API calls and responses to troubleshoot issues.
- Monitoring Tools: Use tools like Datadog, New Relic, or Splunk to ensure system health.
Make the Integration User-Friendly
Now that you have successfully built and deployed an integration, It’s also important to help the user connect to it seamlessly. Here are some pointers to note on that.
- On your SaaS platform, ensure users understand the value of the integration. Clearly explain the use cases, data points, and capabilities of integration.
- Communicate the permissions you’re requesting and why they are necessary. If you are asking for any sensitive scopes like ‘write permission to all data’, Then it is important to explain why your integration can not work with a lower-level permission. This builds trust.
- Differentiate between mandatory and optional data points or scopes so that the end user can make informed decisions on which scopes to grant based on his use case.
- Provide clear, step-by-step instructions to connect with screenshots or videos
- Mention the prerequisites like plan or role-related requirements to connect the integration. For example, Some APIs might be available only in specific plans, Or some permissions can only be granted by Administrators. It is important to mention this clearly so that the end user understands if he has access levels connect to the integration and whether the integration will work for his use case.
- Once the user enters the credentials to connect the integration, Validate API calls and provide meaningful error messages if the authentication is not successful.
- Include a troubleshooting guide to resolve the most common issues.
Final Thoughts
Building integrations may seem complex, but following these structured steps makes the process manageable and effective. Start by exploring APIs, mapping out requirements, and prioritizing security. With well-designed integrations, your SaaS product can unlock unparalleled potential.