A lot of users really like working with BrightGauge because of our capability to integrate with many popular business solutions on the market. The whole point of our app is to make it easy for you to see important metrics from your PSA, RMM, and financial tools all in one place.
You might be asking how we go about choosing the tools that we integrate with. Great question!
Two-fold approach
When we’re looking into business solutions to add to our roster of integrations, there are basically two things we take into consideration: what you - our customers - are asking for and what that solution’s documentation looks like.
Listening to our customers
BrightGauge began on the idea that we could help make the lives of business owners and managers a bit easier. From experience, we knew how much time was spent creating reports each week or logging in and out of multiple accounts and we figured there was a smarter way to use our time.
Our attempt to improve lives, however, would be meaningless if we didn’t take the time to listen to our users wants and needs. Many of you submit requests to integrate with your favorite business tool, and we really take those requests into serious consideration. If we’re receiving multiple requests for one specific tool, that makes a pretty compelling argument to bring it into our system.
That’s not to say that we only focus on popular requests. There have been instances where just a handful of our end users would benefit from a specific integration, but that benefit would be so tremendous that it became a no-brainer to add it in. What we’re trying to say is don’t be shy about telling us what you need!
In addition to listening to you, we rely on our own experience and knowledge, too. Once upon a time, we were the customer, so we’re aware of what the MSP owner’s daily life looks like. We know which tools are being used most often and which key performance indicators (KPIs) to track because we’re really engrained in the industry.
Dissecting the tool
Once we’ve made the decision to take a specific solution into consideration, it’s time to inspect that tool. Generally, we’re asking ourselves two questions:
- What kind of support exists for those looking to integrate?
- Which KPIs will the tool allow us to track?
If the tool we’re looking to integrate is hosted, or cloud-based, it’s essential to look into their API. What does it look like? How is it written? Will it be simple for us to connect to that API? Will the integration be seamless? How much work is there to do on our end? Is there a sandbox account we can use for testing while we set up the integration? What kind of authorization does the API use (we prefer OAuth 2.0)?
If on premise, what does the SQL database structure look like? Are the fields well defined? Does the database support querying by third parties?
Once we’ve deemed the tool’s documentation as friendly, we’ve got to check out their KPIs. What are they allowing us to track and measure? How much data will you, our customers, be able to extract from this tool? If you aren’t able to see KPIs that matter to you and your organization, then what’s the point? We don’t want to create noise - we want to take actions that will make a difference.
Looking ahead
As we continue to improve upon our product and welcome more customers into the BrightGauge family, surely we’ll add new integrations to the mix.
We’re looking forward to announcing new integrations in the coming weeks. In case you missed it, we recently added Infusionsoft to our list!
We know lots of customers like you are using these tools on a daily basis, so these are big. Stay tuned for more on this.
How to voice your needs
Our Support team is an incredible resource when it comes to helping our customers, whether you’re having issues with your dashboards, needing help building out a more complex gauge, or trying to connect a new datasource to your account.
We highly recommend that you visit our support page. Here, you can email our data team with your own integration requests, open a support ticket for bugs you may be experiencing, or browse the knowledge base for a little self-help and troubleshooting.
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