If you’re like most SaaS leaders, you’re feeling the pinch of cost-cutting initiatives and aggressive revenue targets. On top of that, you’re expected to meet ever-growing customer expectations with limited resources. 

These challenges may feel insurmountable, but with an integrated tech stack and automated workflows, you can do more with less. By automating manual data entry tasks across your teams, you can refocus both your IT and business teams on achieving your goals. 

The SaaS industry is expected to reach $247 billion globally in 2024, so now is the time to grow your market share and drive efficiency with automation. Let’s dive into how you can automate your processes end-to-end, from finance to human resources. 

Automate your enterprise

Before you start to build your automation strategy, it’s important to identify points of inefficiency in your workflows. The root cause of inefficient, error-prone manual processes is typically disparate systems. To fix this problem, you will need to integrate your tech stack. 

Given the hundreds of applications in modern tech stacks, IT teams commonly face integration backlogs. Without the ability to handle integration requests quickly, data becomes siloed. This lack of visibility prevents your teams from getting the necessary data to make smart business decisions. To mitigate this, IT teams often turn to quick, custom fixes, but these solutions can cause long-term technical debt, as they require constant maintenance. 

To solve these challenges, you need a strategy that is scalable and involves automating processes enterprise-wide. Here are a few processes that should be on your roadmap:

Lead lifecycle management

Modern lead funnels require data to travel through multiple systems. If these applications aren’t integrated, it can cause follow-up delays–or worse–missed leads. Gain a complete picture of your lead’s journey, and ensure quick and relevant follow up with integration. Learn how with our blog, “Fix your funnel: Increase your speed to lead with lead management integration.” 

Expense management

Manually authorizing, paying, tracking, and controlling all of your organization’s business expenses can be an expensive and time-consuming process. It often results in higher costs, errors, inaccurate financial reporting, and tax complications from incorrect expense filing. By integrating your finance systems, you can automate these tasks to reduce costs per expense, minimize fraudulent expenses, and curtail reporting and taxation errors. 

Onboarding and offboarding

Transitioning employees on and off your teams involves updating numerous systems, from payroll to training platforms. This significantly slows down the onboarding and offboarding process, causes errors and missteps, and prevents your teams from working on strategic initiatives. By automating these processes, you can create a frictionless experience for your employees and teams. Dive deeper into automating the onboarding and offboarding processes with these blogs, “Optimizing onboarding with HR automation” and “Streamlining HR processes with offboarding automation.”

Help desk 

Filling help desk requests in a timely manner is key, but with requests coming from multiple sources, it can be difficult for IT teams to keep track. Additionally, with information housed in a variety of applications across the business, support teams must search for answers manually. By automating your ticketing services with a chatbot, you can respond to requests with the necessary information immediately. 

Product usage 

Your customer service teams should be aware of negative developments in your customer base as soon as they happen. Unfortunately, with product usage data trapped in storage and analytics databases, by the time your teams get the information they need to prevent churn, it’s too late. With integration, you can automatically alert your customer success teams when customer’s product usage drops below the desired threshold. This allows your teams to jump in and remediate the issues to save the account. 

Solve your SaaS challenges with iPaaS

So you’re ready to start integrating your tech stack and automating your processes, but where should you start? There’s a variety of integration solutions available to you, but not all of them are prepared to scale with your growing business. Additionally, some are expensive and require technical resources. 

Celigo offers SaaS businesses a single, AI-powered iPaaS for integrations across all departments. Built with a user-friendly interface for non-technical users, Celigo enables your business teams to build, manage, and monitor their own integrations. With Celigo, you can get the full value of your IT team, business users, and tech stack.

Dive deeper into how to build your integration strategy and automate these processes in our ebook, “Empowering SaaS businesses through integration: A playbook.”