Every day we are more and more consumed by the daily operations of our business… Yes, you are not alone, it happens to all of us. Without almost realizing it, we go into autopilot doing repetitive tasks such as preparing reports or calculations through an Excel file that has been passed from hand to hand through the company since it was made years ago.
We understand you, this makes it impossible to focus on crucial aspects of your business, you spend the day immersed in the daily operations without being able to focus any effort on the growth of your business.
For this, there are tools that help us reduce or eliminate those tedious tasks that we may have in any area of our company. Let’s show you what we are talking about, we welcome you to the world of API connectors.
What is an API connector?
This is an application that performs access requests and processing of various types of information. For example, you can retrieve data from a website that contains information of interest to your business and then perform your own calculations or graph it through the design of a dashboard.
Another clear example is when you are using several computer applications but each one works on its own… With a connector, you can connect the information so that a change made in one app is reflected in another.
Uses of APIs
We have already made a small introduction but let’s make a small summary:
- Integrate several applications with each other to keep essential information about your business updated just by modifying one of them.
- Get live information from websites or other applications. Here you can extract everything from complete news, specific economic data, updated currency exchange rates, and anything else you can think of!
- Make reports with live information, without manually updating anything every week or at the end of each month, you can’t imagine the amount of time we could save.
Examples of API Connectors for companies
Now let’s go into more detail, with real examples from different departments in your company:
Human Resources Automation
Transform the treatment of the greatest asset of your business, people, with improvements in areas such as:
- Talent acquisition: synchronize the information you collect on the different platforms you work with and generate automatic notifications when different actions are performed, such as the registration of a new resume.
- Welcome process: automatically manage your employee’s information, send them documents for signature and keep updated information such as salary payments or the provisioning of their devices (computers, mobile, etc.).
- People management: quickly adapt and inform everyone of new roles and new company policies. Generate alerts regarding expense management, and vacation approvals and stay informed of employee satisfaction by getting real-time information on how your team is doing.
- Checkout process: it‘s never simple… but make sure you have everything under control. Automatically notify finance of payment needs or get alerts on devices you’ll need to return.
Automate your company’s Marketing
Plan your company’s growth from where it all starts, sales:
- Budgets: connect your ERP to bid and budget management applications, so you can more effectively measure the impact of your actions.
- Campaign management: integrates ticketing system with campaign creation and management tools, as well as with other tools such as CRM.
- Lead acquisition: enrich the data received by your leads by synchronizing the information from your social networks, surveys, and others with your CRM. With the correct representation of this information, you can multiply your results by x10.
In addition, you will be able to measure other instant query variables such as retention, ROI, ROAS, and many other variables that will enrich your analytics and facilitate your decision-making.
Customer Service, how to automate it
Improving your customer service is key to making them buy from you again… You have to be very careful in this area, unfortunately, is neglected by many:
- Unique experience: collect all available information from your customers in order to offer them personalized experiences automatically with artificial intelligence solutions integrated with your connector.
- Data analytics: monitor your team’s performance in real-time at a glance by analyzing the incident status and other variables such as average response time.
- Incident management: proactively and automatically detects problems in order to reduce resolution time by connecting information from multiple systems, this will save a lot of headaches…
Automate financial tasks
We are facing a key area, the control of collections and payments, customers who take a long time to pay and suppliers who pressure to pay as soon as possible… are you familiar with this?
- 100% automated sales process: from product configuration, quotation, contract, invoicing, billing, collection, and accounting, everything can be automated!
- Documentation management: automatic update of the documentation received and issued in case of a possible audit.
- Financial reports: consult the financial status of your company live, without the need to make calculations of any kind or wait for the monthly report.
Free API vs. paid API
I know what you are thinking, give me information about the free one, which is the one I am interested in. Not everything is so easy, depending on your needs you will end up requiring a paid one, but don’t worry there are very economical options compared to the benefits it brings you.
Free connectors
They are a good way to get started in this “little world”, although they usually have several limitations. It will depend on the tool but many of these connectors are designed to test the tool for free and as soon as you get used to them you will need to upgrade to the paid version to be able to scale the solution you have implemented.
That said, we are sure you understand how important it is to choose the right API that allows you to scale your business with confidence that there will not be excessive cost overruns in the future due to new needs as they arise.
Some examples of free connectors are:
- Google natives in Locker (former DataStudio).
- Initial versions, with extensive limitations, of Zapier, Integromar, Workato, or similar plans.
Paid connector
This section includes both custom developments (more expensive) and commercial API connector solutions.
Once you begin to understand how it works and how your business can really take advantage of the benefits offered by these APIs the next natural step is to move to the paid version which has several advantages such as:
- More frequent data updates, including live updates.
- Performing more complex tasks, so you will be able to disengage from more tedious tasks.
- More stable connections, which avoid untimely drops.
- Faster computing speed and data transfer.
In this case, we have several recommended paid alternatives following the free alternatives:
- Locker connectors (former DataStudio): there are countless, from MORHE we have found the best value for money in Porter Metrics.
- Zapier, Integromat, or Workato with their payment plans.
It is true that it is necessary to be careful in its implementation, a bad execution can end up costing a lot of money… We will tell you about it.
How much does the connector cost?
Let’s break down the costs associated with these connectors:
- No. of calls to data + calculations performed
- Refresh rate
- No. of connected data sources
- Connections for a wider variety of applications.
- Number of users
- Hosting of your information, reports, and the like.
- Last but not least, is the cost of implementation. Choose a digitizing partner who cares about your business as if it were his own, who looks for the best solution for you and does not just sell you the one he is most interested in… Caring about your needs is our specialty at MORHE, do not hesitate to tell us about any doubt without any kind of commitment.
All these limitations are the ones that differentiate these free versions from the paid plans, we advise you to choose the right agent to digitize and to let yourself be advised within the logic.
We hope you enjoyed the content, do not hesitate to comment on any questions you may have, we are at your disposal!
