Integration with Third-Party Tools: Why Do We Need It?
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It doesn’t matter what kind of goal your business has at the moment (better understanding of customers’ needs, investigating new trends, creating high-quality online help, etc.), data and information always have a crucial role. What we see today is that there are so many services, tools, and apps; some of them solve totally different problems, some of them solve identical problems, but in most cases, software pieces complement each other. Both companies and freelancers often use several tools to support their workflow. It may be challenging. It may take a lot of time and effort. Let’s say you have a huge database of clients, and you use more than one tool to manage and store the information. If you don’t want to add the same data in each tool manually and you need to get the information synchronized automatically, software integration or application integration is a must for you.
Almost all businesses have to use too many tools and services to perform well; the list can be from 10 to 100 positions depending on the industry, the number of employees, goals, etc. It leads to faster evolving integration requests. The main reasons are here:
Software integration is an engineering process of combining two or more pieces of software to solve the problem of data isolation and gather the components of the two sub-systems into a whole one.
It is used to reduce duplicating information and data redundancy. Collecting all the data in one system allows users to efficiently use and manage it. Fast and convenient access to data allows to better track business processes such as sales, operations, employees’ productivity, etc. Here are some vivid examples of software integration:
The list of integrations may be endless depending on your needs and goals.
As a rule, new companies have quite basic software needs. Their processes are yet not complex and large. But those businesses that have a history often see that the amount of information they work with increases, sales are getting lower, customer support becomes less efficient. One of the reasons here is that employees do not cope with the amount of information they deal with, and routine processes take too much time distracting them from more important tasks. Here are the signs that your business needs an integration solution:
Very often, software integration becomes a game-changer, and businesses get a lot of benefits from it. Some repetitive processes remain in the past, and employees pay more attention to what they are supposed to do – increase sales, improve customer experience, create high-quality documentation, etc.
Technical writing is another sphere that uses the benefits of software integration. Help authoring tools offer so many built-in integrations to improve the quality of technical documentation. ClickHelp is a cloud platform that follows this course. It is a flexible technical writing tool that allows using third-party software to make your online help even better. REST API contributes to that. Here are some of the most popular integrations:
You can see the full list of integrations here – ClickHelp Integrations. There are more than 20 integrations that make our platform more powerful. If you need your own integrations, you can add them. For example, you can add JavaScript libraries or custom elements to your topics.
Experts say that software integrations are developing rapidly, and in the future, the pace of this trend is not going to slow down, though it is a complex process that always looks easier on paper than in reality. Companies invest a lot in it as they get great advantages: they increase productivity, control costs, simplify many operations, improve data accuracy, and customize workflow to meet their unique needs. The best strategy for businesses is to make integration a repetitive process to let it work for you.
Good luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices
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