Welcome to Integration Week – Your community tech stack just got better
Welcome to Integration Week! It’s about time we started talking more about our integrations and how they can help you get even more out of your customer community.
Our integration stack helps your customers access the content they need and get faster 1-on-1 help, creating a more dynamic community environment. Plus, they make your day-to-day easier by improving workflows, automating repetitive tasks, and enriching data points – all in the name of creating a better customer experience.
This week, we’ll introduce you to new integrations (come back for a deep dive into our new Productboard integration tomorrow!) and showcase some of our fan favorites.
Today, let’s talk a bit more about why having an integration strategy is so important.
Why having an integration strategy for your customer community is important
The best way to get the most value from your customer community is to integrate it with the rest of your tech stack. Whether you decide to combine inSided with your CRM or Customer Success software to gain deeper customer insights or connect to your everyday workflow tooling for smoother and more efficient community moderation, integrations add value for your teams and your customers.
Creating better workflows for Customer Success and Community teams
Efficiency is key. No matter how well you’re doing and how hard you’re working, at some point, you’ll be asked if there’s a way to get your work done in a more efficient manner. Especially if your company is growing fast. This is often the case when it comes to Customer Success. Because remember all of those debates around how much ARR a single CSM should be able to carry? Oh, yes.
Individual workload aside, Customer Success departments are typically one of THE most budget-constrained departments in a SaaS. As your business grows and the number of customers you’re managing increases, there’s going to be a point where you can’t scale your team quick enough to keep up with that growth. (Roughly translated; you’re under scrutiny of your CFO!) So. Growth through increased efficiency is the logical next step.
Enter: CS tech stack.
The first thing CS teams will look at is tooling and automation. How can we utilize technology to make sure that our CSMs’ time is used effectively? How can we add a one-to-many communication channel to stay engaged with smaller segments of our customers? How can we create and close the feedback loop between our customers, product, and our company? And lastly, how can we do all this, at scale? This is where it’s important to make sure that you’re not making decentralized buying decisions.
Enter: Integrations.
If like us, you’re a SaaS company, you probably have so many tools already. Now, what you need is a tool that can integrate with other core parts of your tech stack. The goal here is not just to integrate to share data, but also to add new insights to existing data. A good example is adding community engagement data to your customer health scores in a Customer Success CRM like Gainsight, Catalyst, or Planhat. This will enable you to better predict customer behavior and predict what accounts your CSMs should be focusing their (limited) time on.
So what do you need to think about when choosing your tools?
Connect to existing processes, don’t reinvent the wheel
New tools shouldn’t force you to create new workflows, they should fit into and help optimize existing processes. Your tools should work together to execute your Customer Success strategy and deliver better results. That’s why integrations play a crucial role when building your tech stack. Because the software tools you’re using then become the means for bringing everything together – not the other way around.
Get other stakeholders involved
Your CS tech stack doesn’t (and shouldn’t) just affect the CS team. It’s about making people and teams within the entire company value and utilize the tech stack and integrations to improve their work. This is when you want to involve other people in the conversation and get buy-in to improve visibility, workflows, and collaboration. Because your CS initiatives will bring value to other teams as well, such as Support, Sales, Product, and Marketing.
Create better results for your customers
Partner integrations are a big part of any successful growth strategy. It’s about making your product more valuable to both new and existing customers. Your integration strategy should ultimately result in better outcomes for your customers. Whether that means better workflows and increased collaboration between teams or directly reflected in saved costs or increased revenue.
An integration strategy prevents you from having a reactionary approach to building out your tech stack and buying tools that might not serve you well. That’s why spending some time to think about what your team will require strategically and operationally and what could help optimize workflows and processes will go a long way toward making your CS tech stack as effective as possible in the long run.
Daniel Boon, Product Manager at inSided sums it up, “With a modern B2B technology stack, it’s critical to connect your customer community into existing workflows, data sources, and content platforms. Content platform integrations benefit end users by making the community the front door and central location for all support and success content. Plus, community workflow integrations help reduce the barrier for Customer Support, Product, and Customer Marketing to get value out of the community. We’re excited to offer integrations with amazing partners like Productboard, Gainsight, Freshworks – and plenty more to come.”
Introducing our integration stack
Now that we’ve covered why having an integration strategy is important, it’s time to take a look at our integration stack.
Freshdesk – Create tickets directly from community posts
Create tickets directly in your community and streamline customer support workflows. Learn more
Gainsight – Get a holistic view of customer health
Gauge customer sentiment and engagement, and gather actionable product feedback. Learn more
Google Analytics – Track and measure your community KPIs
Unlock richer reporting and keep a close eye on community KPIs with Google Analytics. Learn more
Miro – Collaborate with your customers
Collaborate with your customers directly in the community with Miro boards. Learn more
Mixpanel – Track community and product usage
Track the relationship between community engagement and product usage to boost adoption. Learn more
Productboard – Capture insights from community posts
Capture insights from inSided community posts to ensure you prioritize the right features. Learn more
Salesforce – Build a 360º view with community data
Sync and combine community data with business data in Salesforce and get deeper insights. Learn more
Skilljar – Access all resources in one place
Deliver unifying experience of community and education to drive engagement with Skilljar. Learn more
Zapier – Connect to all your favorite tools
Connect your community to over 1,500 apps and integrate seamlessly with your existing tech stack. Learn more
Zendesk – Create tickets directly from community posts
Streamline your customer support workflow: Escalate tickets and search community content with Zendesk. Learn more
Tomorrow, we’ll take a closer look at our Productboard integration and uncover exactly how it allowed Pipefy’s Community and Product teams to work better together.
Make sure to come back then and subscribe to our blog so you don’t miss a beat.
