A guide to ticketing integrations

Welcome to another edition of the Integration Insider—a weekly newsletter that provides the insights you need to build, maintain, and manage product integrations successfully.

In this week's edition we'll break down everything you need to know about accounting integrations.

Note: This article originally appeared on our blog.

As you look to improve ticketing workflows either internally or with your product, you can leverage ticketing integrations.

We’ll help you do so by breaking down several impactful examples as well as tools to help you build them. But first, let’s align on the definition of a ticketing integration.

What is a ticketing integration?

It’s any integration that involves a ticketing system. This can either be an integration between your ticketing system and another one of your applications or between your platform and your customers’ ticketing applications. 

Examples of ticketing integrations

To help bring our definition to life, let’s break down a few internal ticketing integration use cases and then highlight several customer-facing scenarios.

Connect your ticketing tool with your HRIS to streamline onboarding tasks

To help your IT team complete various onboarding tasks on behalf of incoming employees on time—such as purchasing equipment—you can connect your ticketing tool with your HRIS and build the following flow: Once an employee account is created in your HRIS, a predetermined set of onboarding tickets get created in your ticketing tool for that incoming employee.

Sync issues bidirectionally between your CRM and ticketing tool

As soon as one of your customer-facing employees (e.g., customer success manager) discovers an issue that requires a developer’s support, they’ll likely need to file a ticket so that their colleagues in engineering can become aware of the issue and begin working on it quickly. 

To help facilitate this, you can connect your ticketing tool with your CRM and build a bidirectional workflow where once a customer success manager creates a case in their CRM, a corresponding ticket will get created in engineering's ticketing platform. And any time engineering updates an integrated ticket, the changes are reflected in the associated case.

Sync compliance tickets between your product and customers’ ticketing systems

Say you offer a compliance automation platform that lets customers discover and work through the tasks they need to complete to comply with frameworks like GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, and ISO 27001.

To help your customers work through various compliance tasks effectively, you can integrate your product with their ticketing tools and build bidirectional flows between them. More specifically, a user can, with the click of a button, create a ticket in your product; and if a customer makes a change to an integrated ticket within their respective ticketing tool, that can be reflected in their instance of your platform. 

Create tickets when your product detects issues in a customer’s code base

Imagine you offer a platform that lets developers identify, diagnose, and address any issues in their code base.

To help your customers take action on any of the issues your platform detects quickly, you can connect to customers’ ticketing tools and build the following flow: Once an issue is detected, a customer can, with the click of a button in your platform, create a corresponding ticket that includes context on the issue. You can also make the sync bidirectional; that way, your users can get status updates on a ticket that’s associated with an issue without having to leave your product.

Benefits of ticketing integrations

Based on the ticketing integration use cases above, you can probably infer some of the benefits they provide. 

But in case any skip your attention, let’s break down the top benefits of both internal and customer-facing integrations:

Prevents human errors

Manually creating and editing tickets can lead to all kinds of issues, whether that’s adding inaccurate information, making duplicate tickets, or forgetting to create a ticket.

Since ticketing integrations can help your team avoid data entry, they can help prevent a wide range of human errors.

Accelerates time to resolution 

As ticketing integrations automate the process of creating and updating tickets, they allow the relevant stakeholders to discover issues—along with the appropriate context on each issue—quickly. These stakeholders can, in turn, move faster on resolving a given issue.

Enhances the employee experience

Your customer-facing and technical personnel likely don’t want to spend time on tedious, mundane tasks, like re-entering ticketing information across systems.

Ticketing integrations let them avoid this work altogether, allowing them to focus instead on more thoughtful, strategic tasks.

Elevates your close rate

By offering the customer-facing ticketing integrations your prospects need, you’re giving them one less reason to pick an alternative solution (and one more reason to pick yours if the alternatives don’t offer these integrations). 

All else equal, this should result in a higher close rate for your business.

Improves customer retention

As our customer-facing examples highlighted, ticketing integrations can help your platform deliver more value to users, whether that’s saving them time, helping them work in the applications they’re accustomed to, enabling them to address issues faster, and so on. 

These customer experience improvements should eventually translate to a higher retention rate.

Ticketing integration tools

The ticketing solutions you’d use naturally vary based on whether you’re looking to offer internal or customer-facing ticketing integrations.

Internal ticketing integration tools

You’d likely choose between robotic process automation (RPA) software and an integration platform as a service (iPaaS). 

An RPA software allows you to integrate applications via their UIs using scripts (or “bots”), which helps the platform support a wide range of integration scenarios. However, UI-based integrations can be relatively brittle, as a simple UI change in one of the connected applications can break an integration. 

All the while, an iPaaS lets you integrate applications via APIs, making their integrations more reliable, secure, and performant. However, since applications don’t always provide APIs or the endpoints you’d need, this tool isn’t always an option.

Customer-facing ticketing integration tools

You’d likely evaluate an embedded iPaaS solution and a universal API platform (otherwise known as a unified API platform). 

An embedded iPaaS is generally poorly-suited to support customer-facing integrations. The platform forces you to build one integration at a time, requires technical expertise to use, and lacks robust monitoring capabilities. Taken together, these platforms make it difficult to scale your ticketing integrations and maintain each integration effectively.

A unified API solution, on the other hand, lets you add dozens of ticketing integrations through a single build.

In addition, using Merge, the leading unified API solution, you can add integrations across key software categories (including ticketing); access Integration Observability features that let your customer-facing teams manage your integrations; leverage advanced features to access and sync custom objects and fields; and receive integration maintenance support through its team of partner engineers.

Learn how Merge can help you scale your customer-facing ticketing integrations by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.