Survey of Customer Support Leaders on Product Integrations

Customer support teams are on the frontlines for getting customer feedback, and this is true for integrations as well. As Lauren Rose Eimers of Big Cartel put it, “As customer support, we field integration requests from customers, and then we collaborate with the product team and the customer support director to see what can be built. Many integration requests start with customer support, and also end with customer support as we determine whether the integrations are working.”

In order to get more feedback from CS on what customers are voicing with respect to integrations, we surveyed 17 customer support leaders who work in SaaS and asked them what their experiences were with product integrations.

Integration Usage or Requests

So how important are pre-built integrations to SaaS customers?

More than half of our panel reported that 80 percent or more of their customers either used or requested pre-built integrations. 24 percent of respondents said 100 percent of their customers either used or requested pre-built integrations. As one panelist put it, “Almost no software does everything well, so to create a department that runs smoothly, integrations are necessary. They are often what makes the client opt to use our services.”

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Time Customer Support Spends on Product Integrations

We asked our panel how much time they spent dealing with customer integration issues. They reported a fair amount of time being spent, as more than half were addressing customer integration problems regularly, frequently, or daily.

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This, of course, can be helped by deploying the right technology and educating the customer support team on specific integrations. Lauren Rose Eimers provides customer support for Big Cartel, a leading e-commerce platform, as a team lead. She explained, “Some integrations are self-explanatory and intuitive. Other times, it is more difficult to understand, and we try to make sure to offer anticipatory guidance by providing a how-to page and a video so customers can know how to use it.

“We always have at least one person on our team who is an expert in each integration, and knows the third party software well. If it is a more widely used integration, like Google Analytics, we all learn it.”

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Integrations and Customer Satisfaction

Well-built integrations can greatly improve customer experience and satisfaction. We asked the panelists if they believed the availability and quality of integrations affected their customers’ satisfaction.

Related Content: Survey of Customer Support Leaders on Product Integrations

Panelists shared that they believed it made an impact, with over half saying integrations had a fair, great, or tremendous impact on customer satisfaction scores. As a CS panelist from Greenhouse.io explained, “My company has over 300 integrations for our customers to use. This makes a huge difference in their workflows, and in expanding on the functionality of our product.”

Customer support leaders have unique insights into what customers are looking for in a product, and what their pain points are in the customer experience. Our survey of 17 customer support leaders showed that for SaaS companies, both the quantity and quality of integrations significantly impact their satisfaction with the product.