Streamlining customer onboarding for product integrations with Magic Link

Customer onboarding is a critical step for all B2B SaaS companies. It’s the first impression of products, and the stakes are high. Many companies take special care to have dedicated sales engineers or customer success people hand-hold customers through onboarding, answer questions, and help things go smoothly. Even companies with self-serve products often provide guided onboarding for their enterprise customers to ensure they learn all the key features and get maximum value out of the product.

Today we’re excited to announce the release of Supaglue Magic Link, a new managed authentication method that helps companies onboard their customers to their integrations more quickly easily.

The integrations onboarding problem

For products with integrations, the setup is part of this onboarding process. For example, connecting to the customer’s CRM to sync Opportunity records, or integrating with their system of engagement to send emails.

The typical integrations setup looks something like this:

1. Customer navigates to integrations page in the product.
2. Customer clicks a “Connect” button.
3. Customer successfully goes through an OAuth flow.
4. Continue with product onboarding.

In reality, it’s rarely this straightforward. Some common integration onboarding hiccups include:

• Your application needs to connect to a user account with admin permissions, which your customers’ account doesn’t have.
• Your customer needs to ask a developer at their company for an API token to connect to a provider.
• The integration setup flow in your app doesn’t support sandboxes or the other forms of authentication supported by the provider.

In these situations, you’re basically stuck until your end user can get ahold of the right admin or developer to unblock integration setup. We always recommend ensuring the right stakeholders are on the onboarding call to take care of these issues or to handle them in advance, but it’s not always possible to coordinate schedules or rely on busy customers to do pre-work. At best, you’ve successfully gotten your customer to do extra work to try your product; at worst, onboarding and POCs get pushed back weeks or even lost due to the delays.

Introducing Supaglue Magic Link

We’ve experienced these challenges ourselves and heard them from customers, and it’s why we built Magic Link.

Magic Link is a unique, secure, one-time link that allows your customers to connect their SaaS providers and establish connections. You can create magic links in our management portal or via our management API, and you can configure the link’s return URL and its expiry.

When your customer clicks on the magic link, they are guided through a setup flow that is specific for their provider, with all the configuration options necessary to get through without hiccups. Some of these options include choosing between sandbox vs production environments for Salesforce, providing the org_id parameter for Microsoft Dynamics 365, or providing API keys and access tokens for non-OAuth authentication methods.

Unlike the integration authentication flow in your product, which can only be accessed by the specific user when logged in, Magic Link provides a few key benefits that reduce onboarding friction:

1. Share anywhere. You can paste magic links into chat windows during onboarding calls, shared customer Slack channels, and onboarding emails.
2. Deliver to the right person. You can send magic links to the Salesforce admin or developer with access to API credentials to set up the integration securely. No more relying on your customers to pass around credentials internally.
3. Integrate asynchronously. Customers can use magic links to integrate their SaaS with your apps asynchronously, sometimes prior to an onboarding call, without logging into your application.

Accelerating time to value

Time kills all deals, and unnecessary onboarding friction can halt deals and POCs before they even begin. Companies build product integrations to unlock additional value for customers and close more revenue, not to create additional hurdles to getting started with their products. We hope that Magic Link makes it a bit easier for companies to achieve this goal.

As a product, Supaglue is a complete end-to-end integrations platform. One of our goals is to provide not only the core infrastructure to help you ship integrations more quickly but also the tools to enable you to onboard your customers to those integrations more easily.

If you’ve run into challenges with customer integration setup, please reach out to us! We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas. You can also read more about Magic Link in our docs or try it out yourself for free by signing up.