Whether you’re looking to connect your internal software applications or the software your clients use with your product, you likely have a wide range of options to choose from.

To help you prioritize them, we’ll cover some of the most impactful software integrations for internal and customer-facing scenarios.

But before we dive in, let’s align on the definition of software integration.

What is software integration?

It’s the process of connecting software applications with one another, typically through their APIs. These integrations can either be between the applications you use internally or between your product and 3rd-party applications.

Examples of software integration

We'll start by covering a few impactful internal software integrations. We’ll then go on to highlight multiple product integrations worth building. 

Add important documents to secure folders automatically

As business-critical documents are executed, such as an offer letter or an NDA, you’ll want them to be retained and easily retrievable for certain employees. This can not only help you prevent critical information from disappearing or falling into the wrong hands but also save your employees time in the long-run.

To help facilitate this at scale, you can integrate your e-signature platform (e.g. DocuSign) with your file storage solution (e.g. Box) and build a workflow where any time a document is signed by all parties, it gets added to a specific, predefined folder. For instance, a fully-executed over letter can get added to a folder that only contains completed offer letters.

Related: Best practices for integrating software

Streamline the process of enriching leads 

As your marketing team collects new leads, they’ll need to enrich each as soon as possible to determine those that are a fit for your product (and those that aren’t) and how they should be nurtured.

You can enrich each lead at scale by connecting your marketing automation platform (e.g. HubSpot) with your data enrichment tool (e.g. Clearbit) and then implementing the following workflow: Once a new lead gets added to the marketing automation platform, it’s automatically enriched via the data enrichment tool. These enriched insights are automatically added to the corresponding fields within the lead’s profile page in your marketing automation platform.

Related: Several popular examples of cloud integration

Notify sales when new leads come in

To help your sales reps become aware of warm leads on time, you can connect your marketing automation platform with your business communications tool (e.g., Slack) and build the following flow: Once a lead reaches a certain score in the marketing automation platform, they’re automatically shared in a specific channel within the business comms tool.

The message can include key information on the lead, such as the contact’s full name, job title, company, activities, and more. That way, your sales team can better decide whether the lead is worth pursuing and, if so, how they’d go about reaching out.

Escalate customer issues with ease

Your customer support team may need to escalate certain issues to engineering, such as a specific product bug.

To help support flag these issues quickly and easily, you can integrate the ticketing tool they rely on (e.g., Zendesk) with the incident management tool engineering uses (e.g., Jira) and implement the following flow: Once a support rep marks a ticket as “escalated” (or something similar) in their tool, a corresponding issue gets added in engineering’s incident management solution. From there, engineering can quickly discover the issue and begin working on it.

You can even make the sync bidirectional. That way, support can stay up to speed as engineering works through an issue—up until it gets resolved—and communicate updates to the affected customer(s) throughout the issue’s lifecycle.

Automate user-provisioning and de-provisioning in your product

Your clients likely need to add and remove various users in your product over time. In addition, they’ll need to modify users' permissions as the corresponding employees’ roles evolve. 

To help your clients automate user provisioning and de-provisioning in your product with relative ease, you can integrate your product with clients’ HRIS solutions. Once connected, you can sync employees in a client’s HRIS solution with the associated users in your product. 

More specifically, if an employee is marked as deactivated and/or removed in the HRIS, they’ll be removed from your product; if an employee is added to the HRIS, they can be added as a user with certain permissions; and if an employee’s position changes in a certain way in the HRIS (e.g. they move to a different team), their role in your product can change accordingly. 

Enable users to find files and critical information within your product

To make your product more valuable to users, you can integrate with clients’ file storage systems. 

Your clients can then implement syncs where new files in the file storage platform are added to your product; updated files can be updated in your product; and any files that get removed will no longer be available in your product. 

Related: How Assembly uses file storage integrations to build an intelligent, in-product search experience

Create candidates in clients’ ATS solutions once they’re sourced in your product

Say you offer a platform that offers proprietary technology to identify and recommend target candidates for certain roles. 

To help your clients’ recruiting teams find these candidates and begin reaching out to them, you can integrate your product with their ATS solutions and allow clients to implement the following sync: Any time a candidate is recommended in your product, they are automatically added to the client’s ATS solution.

The sync can also work bidirectionally so that your product can collect information on subsequent steps. For instance, if the candidate is eventually marked as a bad fit and rejected in a client's ATS, this data can get added to your product.

As more and more of this type of candidate feedback gets added to your product over time, your product’s AI-powered recommendation capabilities should only improve. 

Enable customers to comply with specific frameworks

Say you offer a compliance automation solution that helps customers identify and complete tasks that are necessary to abide by individual security frameworks, like SOC 2 or ISO 27001.

To help customers manage these tasks, you can integrate your platform with their ticketing applications and enable them to build bidirectional flows.

More specifically, customers can create tickets from your platform, and as employees make updates to those tickets, your platform includes the updates automatically. This can be an individual comment on a ticket, an attachment that proves a client meets a certain compliance requirement, a change in a ticket’s status, and so on.

Related: Powerful application integration use cases

Build powerful product integrations at scale with Merge

Merge, the leading unified API solution, lets you offer a whole category of integrations by simply building to one of its unified APIs, whether that’s accounting, CRM, HRIS, ATS, file storage, marketing automation, or ticketing.

The platform also offers comprehensive integration maintenance support and management tooling for your customer-facing teams—all but ensuring that your integrations are reliable and perform at a high level over time.

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

Software integration FAQ

In case you have any more questions on software integration, we’ve addressed several frequently-asked ones below.

What is a software integration plan?

It’s a documented plan that’s either developed and maintained by your engineering team (for internal integrations) or your product team (for customer-facing integrations). 

It includes the software integrations your team plans to build, why they’re being built, the software and data that's involved, the individuals who’ll participate in each integration project (and in what capacity), and the timeline for rolling out each integration.

What are the different ways to build software integrations?

You can use APIs, files, databases, or scripts that can scrape information.

While each method comes with its own pros and cons, it’s generally best practice to use APIs, as API-based integrations allow you to sync data securely, reliably, and quickly.

What are some types of software integration tools to choose from?

The types of tools you come across will naturally vary depending on your integration requirements. If you’re looking to build customer-facing integrations, you’ll likely choose between a universal API solution and an embedded iPaaS. While if you’re hoping to implement internal integrations, you’ll likely choose between an iPaaS, RPA software, and ESB tools.