| At https://bot9.ai (most advanced AI based Customer service engine) we are currently building integrations for CRMs, Ticketing tools, Chat softwares, Ecommerce platforms etc which the bot connects to. For example the bot connects to freshdesk or intercom and handles the tickets / chats just like a normal agent, and handsover to a human if it can't solve or a customer asks, without the company having to change their chat or ticket tools. Or connects to shopify to help customers answer any pre-sales questions or help them make a purchase decision. I see the pain in building these integration one by one and currently exploring a few SaaS that will help me have lot more integrations without us having to build & test one by one (Months). Paragon , hotglue for example. There are generally two approaches to do this, each with their pros and cons. A few go with a unified api approach.
The benefit is that you can integrate one Unified CRM API and then use all CRM softwares directly.
While this does give a lot of headstart, the downside is that all CRM or ticket softwars may not have the same terminology and you may get into problems. For example, intercom does not really have a ticket type system but still people use it for ticketing. Whlie freshdesk or Zendesk is a proper ticket system with lots of variables that can be mapped to a ticket.
With a unified API you kind of lose out on max potential of the platform you are integrating with, at the cost of faster integration. Then there are direct APIs which still allow faster integration by handling auth, logging, debugging and some kind of unification but you have to still integrate them one by one in your SaaS.
So you gain lot more control, at the expense of time to implement. By looking at the docs, I see they are trying to go with a hybrid model where they give a direct integration option but i can map the models myself which kind of covers both cases ? Someone from the team can comment. But Interesting. This is definitely an interesting space which has been mostly covered by zapier. but zaps are ugly, a glue and very expensive for anything serios and mostly used by individuals who just want to connect a few systems together. In this AI era where everyone is building something with AI and finding out that building the MVP is pretty easy but then gets stuck on expanding because customers wants things to work inside the tools they already use, there is definitely a market for this. I have sent a meeting request, happy to connect and see if this helps us. |