As organizations adopt an increasing number of SaaS applications, the demand for connecting the ones they use internally will only grow. Similarly, your clients will likely ask you to integrate their product with more of their SaaS applications.

But organizations shouldn’t only be building these integrations because their employees or clients ask for them. Each type of cloud integration offers concrete business benefits that should motivate your team to implement them.

We’ll cover these benefits, but before we do, let’s align on the definition of cloud integration. 

What is cloud integration?

It’s the process of connecting cloud applications with one another. Once connected, data can easily stay in sync across these applications over time.

Cloud integration benefits 

To avoid any confusion, let’s cover the benefits of internal and customer-facing integrations separately.

Benefits of internal cloud integrations

These integrations provide countless benefits; here are just a few of the top ones to keep in mind.

Enhances the employee experience

With data syncing across internal cloud systems automatically, your employees can avoid hopping between applications to find information or re-entering data across their applications. 

This not only allows employees to perform fewer tedious and mundane tasks day-to-day, but it allows them to allocate more time towards the strategic, thoughtful work they enjoy instead; this should translate to happier, more engaged employees.

Increases employee productivity and retention

According to Gallup, engaged employees work in ways that are more productive and ethical, as well as safer. As a result, companies with engaged employees often experience less employee turnover, higher sales, and greater profitability.

Related: The top benefits of API integration

Prevents significant human errors

Re-entering data isn’t just unpleasant; it can lead to human errors that carry serious adverse consequences, whether that’s invoicing clients the wrong amount, sending candidates offer letters with the wrong salaries, etc.

Since cloud integrations streamline most data entry-related tasks, you can largely avoid dealing with the human errors that come from performing this type of work.

Enhances team collaboration 

Your employees often work in a specific set of applications day-to-day. For instance, your marketers might spend a lot of their time in your marketing automation tool while your sales team might spend a lot of their time in your CRM.

Since cloud integrations help ensure that employees access the same set of data across their applications, they’re likely to collaborate on specific projects/tasks more effectively (e.g., arriving at the same decisions as new data comes in).   

Benefits of customer-facing cloud integrations

When we surveyed hundreds of product managers and engineers as part of our State of Product Integrations report, we found that the following benefits surfaced most often:

Let’s cover why product integrations can help your organization in all these ways.

Improves close rates for new business

As prospects evaluate your product against others, they’re likely weighing several factors—from pricing to support to integrations. According to Gartner, the last item in this list is especially important; 81% of buyers rate “seamless integrations” as “very important” during their evaluation.

This means that offering more customer-facing cloud integrations than your competitors should, all else equal, translate to more closed deals for your business.

Higher customer retention 

As clients adopt your integrations, they’re likely able to access the data they need in your product more easily. This can lead your product to deliver more value, whether that's by auto-provisioning users, providing enhanced reporting, and so on (the form of additional value your application provides naturally depends on the type of product you provide).

Delivering this increased value should eventually translate to higher client retention, and even additional upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Related: Benefits of application integration

Market expansion 

Organizations across industries, regions, and sizes often use a distinct set of cloud applications to power their operations. As an example, small-to-medium sized companies often use QuickBooks to manage their accounting, while larger companies often use NetSuite.

To help you break into your target markets more easily and successfully, you can, therefore, integrate with the specific cloud applications these organizations use.

Implement customer-facing cloud integrations at scale with Merge

Merge is a single API that lets you offer hundreds of integrations with your product, whether these integrations fall under HRIS, ATS, CRM, ticketing, accounting, and so on. The platform also offers Integration Observability features and maintenance support to help you provide reliable and performant integrations.

You can learn more about Merge and see the platform in action by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.