As companies look to add integrations to their product, they’ll inevitably run into challenges associated with building to individual endpoints and maintaining these connections.

These challenges are only exacerbated when companies scale customer-facing integrations, as each integration requires a unique set of development and maintenance-related work.

To help companies add and manage customer-facing integrations more easily and effectively over time, they can turn to an API aggregation solution.

We’ll explain why by highlighting several benefits of API aggregation, but first, let’s align on the definition of API aggregation and an API aggregation solution.

What is API aggregation?

It’s the process of taking a set of objects and fields from similar API providers and normalizing them into a common data model for a single API. This process also includes unifying authentication, rate limits, and pagination from each provider into a single, consistent approach.

‍What is an API aggregation solution?

It’s a 3rd-party tool that offers aggregated APIs for specific categories of software, such as HRIS, ticketing, and ATS. These solutions can describe themselves as an API aggregator, a unified API, or a universal API; all of which effectively mean the same thing.

API aggregation benefits

Here are just a few ways that organizations can benefit API aggregation.

Improves developer productivity

By using an API aggregation solution, your engineers no longer have to worry about manually building and maintaining each integration, which—as many of our customers have found—can save them hundreds of hours over time.

They can use their time savings to focus on tasks that they’re uniquely suited to perform, whether that’s fixing a bug that’s plaguing your product’s UX, enhancing a core product feature, and so on.

Enhances the employee experience

Not only is building and maintaining customer-facing integrations a productivity drain, it can also lead to a poor employee experience. 

Your engineers can, for example, feel a lot of pressure from prospects, customers, and customer-facing colleagues to build certain integrations quickly or to fix specific integration issues. Moreover, they’re forced to stop working on core projects that they’re more likely to enjoy.

Since API aggregation tools can take the brunt of development and maintenance work off of your engineers’ plates, while also pushing some of the burden onto customer-facing employees, your engineers can dedicate more of their time to the work they want tackle—and what they were likely brought on to do in the first place.

Increases the close rate for new business

Your prospects may ask for specific integrations as they evaluate you against your rivals. 

By using an API aggregation solution to scale your product integrations, you can say “yes” to a high share of these asks from customers, giving them one less reason to pick another vendor.

We’ve seen this benefit play out in the real-world; when we surveyed hundreds of product managers and engineers as part of our State of Product Integrations report, we learned that a higher close rate was the top benefit organizations realize from offering customer-facing integrations.

Elevates customer retention

As customers adopt your integrations, they’re more likely to benefit from your platform, whether that’s managing users more easily, accessing more robust dashboards, handling tickets more efficiently, etc.

Whatever the customer improvements look like from using your integrations, it’ll likely help you improve customer retention.

Provides cost savings to your business

The engineers who can build and maintain integrations are also likely some of the most expensive employees at your organization. 

If you can avoid hiring engineers—or at least hire fewer—for integration-related work, you can easily save several hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, if not millions of dollars. 

Similar cost savings apply to customer-facing employees.

In-house integrations often experience issues, which leads your customer-facing team to have to create more tickets, coordinate and collaborate on resolving these issues internally, and communicate status updates to customers.

Since an API aggregation solution’s integrations are more reliable and the solution may offer comprehensive integration observability tooling, you may not have to hire as many customer success managers.

Finally, an API aggregation solution may also provide integrations that would otherwise require forming expensive partnerships, saving your business thousands of thousands of dollars every year.

Implement customer-facing integrations at scale with Merge

Through Merge, you can add hundreds of integrations to your product from a single build. These integrations also span several categories, from file storage to ticketing to HRIS to ATS.

Merge also provides Integration Observability features that let your customer-facing teams manage your integrations; advanced features to access and sync custom objects and fields; and integration maintenance support through its team of partner engineers.

You can learn more about Merge by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.