Typeform accelerates customer integration velocity 4x to boost retention

Challenge

Retaining and growing new business through integrations 

As Typeform opened a new office and expanded its go-to-market organization, Mathur and his team already knew that integrations were critical to growing the business. “We recently brought on a new sales and partnerships team to support our move upmarket,” says Mathur. “As we scaled our outreach, we heard from more and more prospects that integrations were a top priority.” 

“We ran an internal study which revealed something interesting: Customers with two active integrations were 14% less likely to churn and had a 13.5% higher monthly recurring revenue (MRR). For customers with five or more active integrations, the figures rose to as much as 36% higher retention and 35% higher MRR. But even though we knew that more integrations could have a remarkable impact on our retention, our busy development teams struggled to keep up with the demand from our prospects and customers.” 

The company had already launched three integrations in the past year, but sustainable growth would require far greater output. And to top it off, each integration needed to meet Typeform’s strict standards for quality and user experience. “While we were mostly satisfied with our existing integrations, we knew that our customers could benefit from additional functionality,” Mathur adds.  

Solution

Scaling integrations while retaining quality and design principles 

The Typeform team was familiar with traditional integration solutions, but they had strict requirements that not every tool could address. “We conducted an extensive review process over five months,” explains Mathur. “Before we started seriously evaluating tools, we disqualified the platforms that required additional investment from our customers. Most Typeform users come from smaller teams and don’t have technical expertise. We didn’t want to offload the cost and the burden of integration development to the end-user.”

“Once we had a smaller pool of options, we considered the user experience of each solution. Again, we are a design-focused company. We wanted to be deliberate about what the customer sees, only exposing them to the information they need to get their integration running — nothing more.” However, the Typeform team also needed a repeatable solution to productize integration development. Additionally, an initial assessment revealed that opting to build integrations internally would take upwards of eight months before the team could take something live.

“Eventually, we narrowed down the list to two options. Tray Embedded was the clear winner, with a fully white-labled interface that we could seamlessly implement into our existing integration marketplace. For the integrations that we wanted to prioritize, Tray Embedded also offered greater functionality and flexibility in the operations it could support. Plus, we felt that Tray.io’s ambitious product roadmap aligned with our vision for Typeform."

Use case

Deliver more high-quality integrations, faster 

After choosing Tray Embedded, the team at Typeform set out to build its first customer integration. “We started with a popular customer relationship management (CRM) system that many of our customers wanted to integrate with their forms,” notes Mathur. “We moved fast and ended up being one of the first ten integrations in the product’s marketplace.”

“From there, we built out two other integrations, one to a major file-hosting service and another to a popular e-learning platform. As more businesses are moving remote, the e-learning integration was especially timely to help our customers develop remote training and learning programs. This partnership was very important for us, as we also found a large overlap between our user bases.”

“Early on in the implementation processes, we realized the value of relationships when launching our new strategy. We treated the specialists at Tray.io like members of our own team. If we hadn’t been able to partner so closely with an organization that shared our values, we would have had a much harder time getting those first integrations up and running.” 

Results

Typeform boosts retention and drives strategic partnerships

Now that Typeform uses Tray Embedded, the company has dramatically accelerated its integration schedule. “We’re launching integrations at a pace that we couldn't come close to matching before. We’ve increased our velocity 4x, from three to 12 integrations in just one year,” remarks Mathur. “And as I mentioned before, they’re introducing us to top-tier customers that are more likely to stay with us long-term.” 

“Not only are we launching integrations faster, but we’re able to build them more efficiently, which means we can retask roughly 60% of our integration squads to work on other projects or build even more integrations. Since Tray Embedded is so intuitive and easy-to-use, we’ve been able to have our regular engineering team utilize the solution while we deploy our most-senior engineers to work on more-strategic projects.”   

Beyond efficiency and productivity, Mathur and his team have scaled Typeform’s partnership program to forge new relationships that can grow the business into new markets. “Some of our partnerships just wouldn't exist without the integration component. Because Tray Embedded lets us move so much faster, we’ve been able to forge opportunistic new partnerships in a very timely manner, such as with leaders in the customer support and e-learning spaces. Now, we have the confidence to move fast and build deep connections with companies that just weren’t feasible before.” 

“Anecdotally, we’ve received positive feedback from partners and customers on the quality of our new integrations. One of our partners has been demoing our integrations to their customers, and we’re excited to hear that it has been well-received.”     

Next steps

Moving upmarket with unparalleled integration availability  

“Our philosophy has always been to increase the availability and quality of integrations for our customers,” says Mathur. “Now that we have a steady stream of new pre-built connections, we can focus on enhancing our developer platform.”

“From a market perspective, we’re looking to get to a point where our sales team never says no to a deal due to lack of integrations. In essence, we’d like to open up our total addressable market to a wider variety of people and businesses. Particularly, we think more integrations will help us move upmarket and meet the challenges of the enterprise.” 

Now that you’ve seen how Typeform uses Tray Embedded to scale its integration strategy, check out our case studies with other fast-growing businesses, including Cue and Copper. If you’d like to learn more about the product, consider signing up for a 1:1 demo.