15 API integration examples that can transform your business

As you look to integrate applications either internally or with your product, you’ll have a few options for establishing the connections.

In most cases, your best option is to integrate applications via their application programming interfaces (APIs), as this allows you to establish reliable and secure connections and sync data at high frequencies. 

But what specific API integrations should your team look to build? The answer depends on various factors, from the applications you use to the pain points you or your clients experience. 

To help you brainstorm, we’ll highlight several powerful API integration examples. But first, let’s align on the definition of an API and API integration. 

What is an API? 

It’s a set of protocols and standards that allow disparate applications to communicate with one another. A given API request includes a client that’s making an HTTP request to an API endpoint, and a server that’s receiving the request, processing it, and returning a response.

What is API integration?

It’s any integration that’s built on APIs. This includes integrations between the applications you use internally as well as any between your product and 3rd-party applications.

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API integration examples for internally-used applications

Here are some powerful API integrations you can build for the applications you use internally:

Message account managers when customers are late on payments

Your customers will, inevitably, not pay their invoices on time or in full. 

To help your customer success or account managers identify these customers and the specific payments that haven’t been paid, you can integrate your ERP system (e.g. QuickBooks Online) with your business communications platform (e.g. Slack) and build the following flow:

Once an invoice hasn't been paid for a certain number of days past the due date, the customer-facing employee who manages the customer relationship will receive a message with details on the delayed transaction. 

Depending on how the integration gets implemented, these details can include the customer, the amount they owe, when the payment was due, who can be contacted, and more.

Surface upsell opportunities to based on product usage data

Say a customer is close to reaching their usage threshold on their current plan and, as a result, they may be open to moving up to the next tier. 

To help your sales reps or account managers (whoever owns upsell deals) identify these customers quickly and reach out to them with the appropriate message, you can integrate your data warehouse (e.g., Snowflake) with your CRM (e.g. Salesforce) and implement the following integrated workflow: Once a customer’s product usage crosses a predefined level for a given plan, a task gets assigned to the relevant rep/account manager in your CRM. 

This task can include context on the customer's level of usage and the specific plan they should be upsold into—enabling the customer-facing employee to reach out with the right message.

Related: Popular examples of application integration

Equip employees with the appropriate equipment as they change roles

Your employees are likely to change departments, move into people management, relocate, and go through other changes that necessitate different types of equipment. For example, if the employee gets promoted to a people manager role, they may be eligible for another—more expensive—laptop. 

To accommodate your employees’ evolving equipment needs over time, you can integrate your HRIS (e.g., Workday) with your ticketing system and build the following automation: Once an employee’s HRIS profile changes in a way that necessitates an equipment purchase, the appropriate ticket(s) get created in your project management platform (e.g., Jira).

From there, your IT team can work quickly to purchase and deliver the equipment.

Sync customer issues between your ERP system and your CRM

As finance bills clients, they may run into issues, such as the client failing to pay on time. 

To ensure the dedicated customer success manager (CSM) becomes aware of this situation quickly and has all of the context they need to take action, you can integrate your ERP system (e.g. NetSuite) with your CRM (e.g. Salesforce) and build the following workflow: Any time a case gets created for a specific account in the former, a corresponding case gets added for the account in the latter, which can include all of the important details finance added.

Send messages on employees’ work anniversaries

As employees reach important milestones, such as a work anniversary, you may want to flag the event to the broader team so that all of their colleagues have a chance to congratulate them. 

To help facilitate this use case, you can integrate your HRIS (e.g. Workday) with your business communications platform (e.g. Slack) and build the following workflow: Any time it’s an employee’s anniversary—as determined by the start date in their profile within your HRIS—, a pre-configured message goes out to a specific channel in your business comms platform (e.g. #employee-announcements). From there, colleagues can learn about the employee’s anniversary and send them a friendly message. 

Add employees to your HRIS as soon as they sign their offer letter

To ensure new hires have everything they need by the beginning of their first day, IT and HR will need to know when the new hire is joining as soon as possible. That way, they have enough time to execute all of their tasks on behalf of the new hire.

With this in mind, you can integrate your applicant tracking system (e.g. Greenhouse) with your HRIS and build a workflow where any time a candidate is marked as hired in the ATS, they’re added as an employee in the HRIS. Their employee profile would include important details from their candidate profile, like their location and job title, so that HR and IT can carry out their pre-boarding tasks effectively.

Related: Common software integration use cases

Create offboarding tickets when employees are set to leave

Similar to the last example, IT will need to know which employees are leaving and when so that they can carry out their offboarding tasks successfully.

To that end, you can integrate your HRIS with the ticketing tool IT uses (e.g. Zendesk) and build the following workflow: Once an employee is scheduled to be terminated in your HRIS, a set of offboarding tickets get created in the ticketing tool IT uses.

Create leads in your CRM

Once a prospect becomes a sales qualified lead—according to the rules you’ve defined in your marketing automation platform—, a sales rep should follow-up quickly to maximize their chances of converting them into a paying customer.

To help them do just that, you can connect your marketing automation platform (e.g. Marketo) with your CRM and implement a sync where once a lead becomes qualified for sales outreach, they get added as an opportunity to your CRM and assigned to a specific rep.

Add key insights on leads in your CRM

Your team likely nurtures leads with various sequences through a sales engagement platform (e.g. Outreach).

You can share the insights associated with these nurturing activities with reps via your CRM—such as the emails contacts receive and engage with—so that they can better prioritize the leads they follow-up with as well as how they follow-up. 

Simply integrate the two applications and build the following sync: Any time a contact gets added or removed from a nurture sequence or responds to an email from that sequence, the  activity gets added to the associated contact in your CRM.

Related: Top benefits of API integration

API integration examples for customer-facing use cases

In the case of customer-facing integrations, your top use cases will naturally depend on the applications your clients and prospects use and the specific product enhancements or innovations you’re looking to implement.

To help drum up some inspiration, here are a few examples (they include assumptions about your product and your desired use cases):

Empower customers to analyze their workforce’s office usage 

Say you offer a workplace management solution that lets leaders set up and enforce hybrid work policies for their teams (e.g., deskbird).

To help leaders determine whether their policies are followed and to help them understand how their teams use the office space more generally, you can:

1.  Integrate with customers’ HRISs and sync data like time off and remote days across the team.

2. Use this data to power a real-time report on your team’s office usage—similar to what deskbird has managed to do below.

Enable customers to send invoices with ease

Say you offer a FinServ platform that lets customers create and send invoices.

To make this process seamless for customers, you can integrate with their ERP systems and implement functionality that can work as follows:

Once a customer begins to create an invoice in your product, the key fields and associated values are pulled directly from their ERP system. For example, the customer can find the customer name field and then the specific customer via a dropdown.

You can also make the sync bidirectional. That way, as customers create, send, and receive payments from invoices, the relevant invoicing fields in their ERP systems will get updated accordingly.

Allow your customers’ employees to take advantage of valuable learning opportunities 

Imagine you offer a learning management system (LMS) and want to help your customers surface the best learning materials and opportunities for each of their employees over time.

To help you do just that, you can integrate your product with their HRIS and sync employee fields like full names, job titles, departments, work locations, and more.

This integrated data—coupled with the learning resources your customers want to provide—allows any of your customers' employees to find the most relevant learning resources with ease.

As an example, if an employee is a mid-level UX designer, they can access books, conferences, and events that look as follows:

Send surveys to employees and candidates at the right time

Say you offer a platform that allows recruiting and HR teams to survey prospects and employees and analyze their responses.

Your users likely want to survey each group at specific points in time. For instance, you can survey a new hire after 30 days to see how their onboarding experience has been; and you can survey candidates as soon as they accept their offer letter—or get rejected—to gauge their experience throughout the interview process.

To help your clients survey candidates and employees at these key points in time, you can integrate your product with clients' HRIS and ATS platforms and sync information to your product, like the status of a candidate or an employee's start date.

Keep employee information up to date in your product

Imagine you offer a product that allows employees to send messages and rewards to their colleagues. 

To ensure new hires can use your application, departing employees lose access to it, and employees’ allotted gifting budgets align with their job level, you can integrate your product with clients’ HRIS applications. You can then sync the employee rosters from clients' HRIS platforms with your product on a frequent basis (e.g. every hour) to ensure your application has accurate employee information at any point in time. 

Help clients act on any issues your product identifies

Let’s assume you offer a product that can detect a variety of security issues for organizations (e.g. potential fraud). 

To help your clients uncover these issues and address them with ease, you can provide integrations between your product and the ticketing applications your clients use. You can then design a sync where any issues flagged in your product create a ticket in the client’s application, which includes the key details your product discovered.

Related: Popular API integration tools

Build customer-facing integrations at scale with Merge

Building API integrations between your product and clients’ 3rd-party applications in-house (i.e. building native integrations) can be time-intensive and overwhelming for your engineers. 

You can take the work off their plate and build flexible, high-performing, and secure product integrations at scale with Merge—the leading Unified API platform. 

Merge offers unified APIs across key software categories; simply build to one of these unified APIs (or universal APIs) and you’ll have access to dozens of integrations, whether that’s with CRM systems, ticketing apps, file storage solutions, etc. 

Merge also offers accessible and robust integration management capabilities to help customer-facing employees address clients’ integration issues with ease; comprehensive common models for each unified API so that your clients can access and sync the data they need; advanced security features to keep your clients’ data secure—and much more.

Learn more about Merge by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.

API integration FAQ

In case you have any other questions on API integrations, we’ve addressed several frequently-asked ones below.

What is an API integration strategy?

It’s a documented plan that lays out the rules and principles of how an organization builds and maintains their API-based integrations. This includes high-level information, like the business goals they’re prioritizing from their integrations. And it includes more detailed, tactical information, like the individuals who need to be involved for certain types of integrations and in what capacity.

How do you plan an API integration?

Every API integration build is inherently unique, which can influence your organization's planning process for each integration. 

That said, common steps for planning an API integration include determining the goals of the integration, coming up with the action items for building it, accounting for  challenges in advance, and developing a plan for monitoring and maintaining the integration.

What are some of the benefits of API integrations?

The benefits vary, depending on whether you’re referring to internal API integrations or customer-facing API integrations. 

In the case of internal integrations, the benefits often take the form of time savings, productivity gains, happier and more engaged employees, and fewer human errors;  customer-facing integrations can help organizations elevate their close rates, improve client retention, and expand to new markets.

To learn more about the benefits of each type of API integration, we recommend visiting this guide.

What are some examples of API integration tools?

Like the previous question, the answer is different based on whether you’re looking to build internal or customer-facing API integrations.

If you want to outsource customer-facing integrations, you’ll likely consider embedded integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solutions like Workato, Tray.io, and Prismatic as well as unified API platforms like Merge, Apideck, and Finch. And if you’re evaluating internal 3rd-party integration tools, you’ll likely evaluate robotic process automation (RPA) solutions like UiPath and Automation Anywhere as well as iPaaS tools like Boomi, Mulesoft, and Jitterbit.