How to overcome the challenges of building and managing product integrations (3 real-world examples)

The process of building and maintaining product integrations in-house can be extremely resource-intensive for your in-house engineers.

When it comes to building integrations, your engineers have to get access to a provider’s API documentation, learn how to build to individual endpoints through the docs, scope the integration builds, implement them via custom code, test the connections, and more. And maintaining integrations isn’t any easier; it involves identifying integration issues, communicating errors and remediation steps with clients quickly and clearly, keeping customer data secure and private, and so on.

All of this work has to be done for each and every integration, which can eventually become impossible for your limited engineering resources to accommodate.

To make these build and maintenance hurdles more concrete, along with the solutions for addressing them, we’ll walk you through the journeys that 3 of our clients have taken.

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Snappy enables customer support to manage integration issues

Snappy, the award-winning, all-in-one gifting company, didn’t want their engineers to get involved in managing day-to-day integration issues. 

They knew that having them identify individual issues, pinpoint the best way to resolve each, and then sharing the solution with customer success was extremely time consuming at scale and was a suboptimal use of their time. 

They also knew that by the time the customer success manager passed the solution on to the affected customer, enough time would have passed that the client would get frustrated. 

With this (along with other buying criteria) in mind, the team decided to invest in Merge and leverage the platform’s Integrations Management features. 

The result is exactly what they hoped for. 

“With Merge, managing API integrations shifted from a technical task for engineers to something our customer support could easily handle.”
— Ry Sullivan, Chief Product Officer at Snappy

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Snappy’s customer support team can now identify issues in Merge’s Dashboard, discover the root cause of the issue, and find all of the steps associated with resolving it. The customer support team can then simply copy and paste these steps and share them with the affected client. 

Learn more about Snappy’s experience with Merge.

Ledgy meets region-specific integration demands via a unified API

Ledgy, a leading European equity management software company, serves clients across Europe, including the UK, France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. 

Ledgy needed to build integrations with the HRIS systems that are popular in each of these countries. Moreover, they had ambitions of expanding to new markets around the globe, and the organizations within these markets have unique HRIS integration demands. 

Taken together, they knew their current approach of building integrations in-house wouldn’t meet clients’ integration demands fast enough. 

Sitong Wei, a Product Manager at Ledgy, explained the drawbacks of their current approach: “Our engineers were forced to build integrations sequentially, and for every integration we built, we had to keep up with updates and debug continuously.”

To neatly address this, they built to a single API: Merge’s HRIS Unified API. 

Through a single integration build, they unlocked 50+ HRIS integrations, helping them not only meet clients’ integration needs and expand to their target markets within Europe and Asia but also freeing up developers from building and maintaining integrations.

Learn more about how Ledgy used integrations to help scale their global presence.

Travelperk accesses all the insights they need on their integrations in one place

Forcing your developers and support teams to track and analyze integration data that lives in disparate places can quickly prove overwhelming and unsustainable. 

Your team will have to constantly perform context switching; they’ll have a harder time finding the information they need (as they need to learn how to navigate different UIs); and they’ll need more time to look up and find data. All of this combined ultimately slows down your team’s ability to troubleshoot and resolve issues.

The team at Travelperk, which provides a corporate travel management platform, uses Merge’s full suite of Integrations Management features to ensure the issues outlined above don’t affect their team.

Carlos Armas, the Product Director at TravelPerk, explains further:

“Having a single place where we can review logs, permission issues, and just monitor each integration has been massively helpful. It’s also something that I think most integration tools don’t prioritize.”

Learn how Merge, the leading unified API solution, can help your team build and manage integrations effectively at scale by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.