When you’re evaluating or re-evaluating software solutions for your business, a lot of big name vendors market themselves as having various platform features i.e onboarding, CRM, quoting…etc. However, the reality is that most only have a preferred partnership or integration with another vendor that houses those features for them. While certain vendors are superior when it comes to one or several of these pillar software features, very few are great at all of them, thus the need for them to build out integrations.

According to Cloudify, 70% of integration projects fail to achieve goals set for the project. For integration projects, the first casualty is usually the project schedule. When a simple project starts to last for several months, someone has probably overestimated their capabilities. This is often caused by people who do not know or understand the business processes involved, which can very easily lead to overlooking extremely important details regarding the integration. This will, in turn, lead to incorrect planning and scoping of the project which is a guaranteed recipe for failure. 

Like the weather, software is constantly changing and not incrementally over long periods of time but in leaps and bounds. Each time this happens, all connected systems must be updated as well. For example, if your sales department was using an automated dialer software that is integrated with and pulls contact information from your CRM, a change to a contact’s information may not update in your automated dialer software until someone goes and manually updates it. All this does is create more steps in the process of maintaining your structured data.

System accountability and data ownership are also two factors that inhibit many integrations from going smoothly. The reason being that most software vendors today are guilty of having “not my problem” syndrome, or the passing of their software issues off to other software systems. Going back to the aforementioned example of the integrated auto-dialer and CRM software, if something were to go wrong, it can easily become a finger pointing contest between vendors, leaving your business feeling helpless. On the contrary, one vendor equals one source of support.

More often than not though, businesses will still opt for the multiple integrations play when it comes to their software solutions. The idea of tying together several specialty solutions just sounds much more enticing to most, and in their minds, this will help them remain at the forefront of digital transformation. AgencySmart’s solutions differ from the competition in the sense that our solutions are built on one centralized platform by brokers that grew tired of the everyday inefficiencies they experienced with the tools they were provided. When we receive feedback from users that there’s a need for a feature on our platform, we don’t take shortcuts and leave it to someone else. We build it ourselves!

About AgencySmart: AgencySmart is an “all-in-one,” cloud-based solution designed for general agents and retail brokers who sell employee benefits, insurance products, financial services, and other industry related products (HR and consulting) to the commercial and individual marketplace. By combining CRM, Commission Tracking, Quoting, and On-boarding/Benefit Administration technologies, AgencySmart solves the problem of using multiple systems to manage your business.