Supercharge your customer support with custom embedded apps

Embedded apps, also known as sidebar apps, are powerful tools to streamline and enhance your workflows. The typical sidebar app is a compact piece of software that integrates seamlessly into the side panel of a larger application’s interface to extend its functionality. Embedded apps are designed to give access to tools, features, and interactions related to a user's task – often by integrating externally with communication tools, databases, and project management software.

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Teams with a high volume of repetitive tasks and specific workflows that find themselves reaching the limits of out-of-the-box platforms and tools will find it especially useful to create and use embedded apps. These apps provide extended functionality without the need for extensive custom development.

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Why should you be using sidebar apps for customer support software?

Because there’s really no reason not to. When embedded apps are added to CRM and customer operations platforms like Salesforce and Front, they help increase agent’s productivity and streamline workflows. Both customers and operators get a better experience. Below are a few examples of what embedded apps can do for you.

• Faster and better responses: Speed up turnover by generating personalized email responses, quickly assigning tasks to collaborators, and performing data validation.
• Workflow Automation: Automate certain tasks, like assigning tickets to specific agents based on predefined criteria, sending automated follow-up emails, or updating customer profiles.
• No more context switching: Access contextual information like payment history from Stripe, order details from Shopify, or a customer’s tier from your own internal database. 
• Increased collaboration: Leverage real-time collaborations, task tracking, and integrations with communication tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and your internal ticketing systems.
• Communication Tool Enhancements: Integrate with chat or video conference tools, allowing your agents to communicate seamlessly with customers without leaving your CRM.
• Improved decision-making: Gain insight from real-time information streams and collaborations as well as contextually generated insights.
• Reduced learning curve: Combine the advantages of embedded apps so new hires can onboard quickly and learn on the fly.

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Prebuilt sidebar apps

You can find hundreds of applications for Salesforce and Front on their respective online marketplaces, both free and paid. Out-of-the-box embedded apps are simple to incorporate into your workflows. 

There are prebuilt solutions and integrations for a wide variety of common use cases that enable businesses to streamline customer interactions, support requests, and other related tasks. 

Here are a couple of popular solutions:

Jira for Front links Front communications with Jira tickets, creates issues on the fly, and assigns due dates and responsibilities. 

Front's integration with Jira helps arrange your development projects and streamline feedback to your team. You can seamlessly connect Front messages with active JIRA issues to incorporate essential customer feedback and generate new tasks with deadlines and assignees, all within Front's interface. Once a Jira issue is marked as resolved, associated conversations will be automatically reinstated in Front.

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Value Analytics for Salesforce creates visualizations of user adoption metrics related to features, functions, and click paths. 

It will assist you in understanding user priorities, identifying areas for enhancement, and determining potential elements for elimination, all with a focus on business KPIs.

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While prebuilt sidebar apps can be convenient, a one-size-fits-all approach often leaves these solutions lacking and inflexible to your needs. Costs accumulate fast when you incorporate more and more premium apps as ad-hoc solutions. And an overreliance on third-party apps means you are dependent on someone else's team for updates, patches, and bug fixes. Moreover, marketplace solutions often fail to scale and adapt to your growing business needs.

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Building custom apps from scratch

Creating your own custom Salesforce app or Front plugin is a great way to ensure your specific needs are met. A customized solution gives you flexibility and control without the complications of an intermediary third party. 

When building a custom embedded app from scratch, you’ll need to undergo a series of steps. Some of them will vary based on your CRM or helpdesk solution and their Software Development Kit (SDK) requirements, but they are generally as follows:

1. Download the SDK in an installable package provided by the platform. Find out more information about your specific customer support tool’s SDK with Front and Salesforce's developer documentation.
2. Interview the agents, team members, and end-users to understand how your app should look and what exactly it should do. It’s key to get a holistic perspective from your stakeholders at this stage.
3. Create a mockup or prototype of your app and gather feedback. It’s important to achieve an intuitive UI for your end-users. Embedded apps are constrained by iframe size, so space must be used wisely.
4. Develop your app using the SDK. At this stage, proper integration with any necessary APIs is vital to ensure correct data exchange and compatibility.
5. Deploy your app. The specifics of deployment will vary depending on which platform the app is for. But in general, you must package your app, choose where to host it, and create a plan for maintenance and scaling. 

You can see that developing your own solutions requires a lot of effort and can introduce plenty of headaches. Complexity and scope creep can eat away at your valuable time when your skills are likely needed elsewhere. When integrating with external data sources, you need to learn the documentation, handle responses and errors, and then maintain the integration – a tedious process. And as you encounter bugs or wish to add new features, each further iteration requires a new deployment to refresh the app and reflect the changes. This all adds up to more hours spent tweaking an app that’s meant to save time and make life easier.

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Building custom sidebar apps made easy

Uify is the simplest way to build customized embedded apps for Salesforce and Front. As a collaborative low-code platform, Uify makes creating modern UIs quick and easy. 

Here’s why Uify is the smart choice for building customized apps fast.

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Build user interfaces in no time

With Uify’s visual UI builder, it’s as simple as drag and drop to make an intuitive interface for your team. Uify’s extensive library of ready-made UI components is already designed to work with your customer success software, so you don’t need to fuss over details like pixel width restrictions. And you’ll find Uify familiar and easy to use with IDE-like features such as auto-complete, suggestions, and a typing system.

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More integrations, fewer headaches

Uify’s seamless integrations make connecting data sources a breeze. Just your provide login credentials and use Uify’s pre-built integrations that take care of the rest. 

Integrating with REST APIs, databases, and data warehouses is easy too. Uify has built-in integrations for PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Snowflake, and more. And it gives you effortless programmatic access to your customer success software using the APIs and SDKs of Front and Salesforce.

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Leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence

Another great advantage - Uify puts the power of AI in your hands to accelerate your customer support while maintaining a human-like feel.

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You can integrate leading AI models directly into the custom apps to automate your customer support workflows. Here are some examples of what you can do:

• Turn text into structured outputs like JSON and then use the same outputs to make API calls and database requests, all with built-in validation. 
• Give your customer support agents the power to read and reply to messages in any language.
• Fetch data from the incoming emails and generate AI-tailored responses using context from your internal data to assist agents in solving complex cases.

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We take care of hosting

There’s no need to spend precious time creating your own environment to host your customized apps with Uify. Simply deploy to your Uify workspace and be done. Uify takes care of scalability and maintenance from there.

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Install once and iterate away

No one gets it right on the first try, but iteration doesn’t have to be a pain. Once your Uify app has been installed into your customer support tool, you won’t need to re-upload after you make changes like you would with other custom apps. You can quickly iterate over versions till you get it right. Just go to your workspace, make your modifications, and deploy. All your changes are reflected instantly, making testing and development easier than ever.

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Unlock the power of sidebar apps with Uify today

Whether you’re already using embedded apps in your customer support workflows or you’re looking to start today, Uify empowers you to build better, more efficient, and customized solutions for tools like Salesforce and Front.

Get in touch with our team and we’ll help you streamline your workflows to get the most from your customer success software using Uify! Book your free demo today.