In 2017, the average number of apps any individual organization used was about 17. That’s up to 17 different programs that an employee might have to learn to use and switch between — often duplicating data entry at every step.
By last year, that number leaped to 110.
Feel overwhelmed yet? All these tools are supposed to make us more productive, but somehow just end up duplicating effort, slowing us down, and making us overuse our “head-desk” emoji in Slack.
That’s why, after capping off our Issuetrak 14 series with API v2 last month in 14.9, we’re moving on to an even bigger game-changer: Issuetrak 15, with Zapier integration.
First, the basics. Zapier is a tool that lets users connect two or more apps, with no code needed. With more than 4,000 compatible apps, Zapier can turn all your individual best-in-class tools into an integrated suite.
How? Pick your apps, then choose a trigger - the event you want to start knocking over automation dominos. Say you’re onboarding a new staff member, and they’ll need specific permissions tied to their role. Creating their record in another app, like Salesforce, would be your trigger.
That trigger causes an action - the thing you want to happen automatically. If you have Zapier connecting Salesforce and Issuetrak, then that user creation can automatically create and set up that user in Issuetrak for you.
And that’s a Zap!
“A lot of people already have these different apps, and up until this point they’ve been walled gardens, unable to interact or manually forced to interact,” said Jon Rivera, Issuetrak’s Director of Product Management. “This release allows that direct connection between apps. No matter what the entry point, this brings in the most accurate data, with no manual work.”
There are 4,000-plus reasons to build Zapier integration into Issuetrak, but for us, it always comes back to our customers — and you’ve been asking for integrations for a while. (See? We do listen!)
“Our responsibility as the developer is to nurture the in-between, to connect it all together and make everything easy for our customers to use,” said Dan Flowers, Issuetrak’s CEO.
Now, he added, a customer can automatically set up a new empowered user in Issuetrak with all the pre-identified permissions needed for their role — just by adding them in Salesforce or HubSpot, or even sending a message from Slack.
Some of the requests we’ve heard most often have been for integration with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, MailChimp, and similar tools.
“You name it, and customers have sought an integration,” Jon said.
To make it easier to get started, we’ve set up a few templates to inspire customers, like creating a new user when a new contact is added to Salesforce, or sending Slack announcements when new Issuetrak users are created.
As exciting as this development is, this is just the beginning. Right now, Zapier works in Issuetrak with users, groups, and organizations in Issuetrak, but we’re still hard at work on getting issue submission up and running. As we continue to streamline and modernize Issuetrak, we prioritize our Product Roadmap based in large part on customer feedback, so we’d love to hear your feedback — use this link to send it straight to our Product team!
Want to know more about the technical details? We've written this Help Center article just for you. Need more information or support? Head over to our Contact page to find the perfect place to start, whether you're a current customer or looking for more info from our Sales team.
We’re thrilled to offer Zapier to our customers, but since we use our own software for customer support, Human Resources, and other aspects of our operations, we’re pretty excited to put Zapier to work, too! Our tech stack includes partners like HubSpot, Asana, and Slack. And while excellent customer support is at the heart of every team, we’ll own it: it’s tough to keep track of all that information when we have to manually copy it among a dozen tools.
Take customer support, for example. Using Issuetrak, we maintain customer satisfaction rates between 97-100% — as evaluated by our Director of Customer Operations, Alex Goolie, whose rigorous standards keep us honest. But no matter how great a customer’s call with our Support team goes, we then have to get the information they shared with us out of our own software and into the other platforms our teams use to stay in touch and get stuff done.
That means someone in Support has to notify an account manager, who has to make sure our customer relationship management software, HubSpot, captures the relevant information, using Slack, email, and other tools to communicate and move information in the process. It’s a lot of duplicated effort — and if something gets lost in translation, we’re not serving our customers up to our own standards.
Now, Zapier lets us connect Issuetrak with our CRM and our primary communication tools. Information that used to sit and wait for attention now moves automatically to where we need it, improving our accuracy and efficiency even further.
“We’re already using Zapier in a couple of different ways to provide a deeper integration with our CRM platform, while empowering our account managers and sales team to do more faster,” Dan said.
Our software already offers powerful automation options, and now with the addition of Zapier integration, that power is expanding exponentially. With an average tech stack of over 100 apps, integration isn’t just nice to have; it’s essential.
Make work less frustrating with Issuetrak — and now, Zapier too!