James Clark remembers when one of Brightspot's most frequently used, high-profile integrations broke.
The content management platform had been growing, fielding more and more integration requests from customers. As VP of Platform Product Development, James was responsible for the technical demands. Building new integrations consumed precious developer hours, while maintaining integration health stretched the team. Something had to give—and eventually, it did.
To prevent another integration from breaking, James needed a way to give his developers back some time. But he didn't want to stop saying yes to customers. So James began looking for a partner that could free up Brightspot's time by authenticating, authorizing, and maintaining API connections.
That partner is Zapier.
"With Zapier," said James, "we can have developers focused on the fun parts of creating third-party integrations, and not the maintenance and other parts they don't enjoy."
Problem: Integrations are expensive and require constant maintenance
Two to three months of development, and tens of thousands of dollars across Development, Quality Assurance, and Product Management. On average, that's what it takes to build one third-party integration for a content management system, barring maintenance. Given Brightspot's growing customer demands, those were colossal orders to keep up with.
"Our goal was to build integrations for our customers a lot faster, cheaper, and easier," said James. "The dream was to give our product managers access to no-code tools so they could make integrations without even asking an engineer. We weren't sure we could get there. And then we discovered Zapier."
To safeguard customer data, Brightspot also required strict control over who could access and modify automated workflows. "Priority zero for us was that we needed to be able to have rule-based access controls for our employees using an automation tool."
Fortunately, Zapier's Enterprise plan is built on a foundation of data security. "With Zapier's Super Admin, we can control who has access to what, which keeps our data segmented and secure," said James.
Solution: Implementing Zapier for customer-facing teams
Before picking a solution, James wanted to create a proof of concept.
"When evaluating automation tools, we took half a dozen integrations that our team had previously written in code at Brightspot and replicated them within those tools," he said. "We wanted to see the delta in the time spent and cost. After doing that with Zapier and a couple of their peers, Zapier was the clear winner."
Not only did they replicate their integrations in less time and for lower costs, James added that "in some cases, Zapier actually made the integrations better."
It was during a call with one of Brightspot's highest-paying customers that the value of a Zapier partnership crystallized. The customer requested an integration that Brightspot had previously taken off the roadmap due to resource constraints. James took this as an opportunity to show Brightspot's leadership why investing in Zapier was important. His team created the integration in just 35 minutes—a project that would've previously taken a few months and resulted in a large bill to the customer.
The customer was blown away, and so was the rest of the Brightspot team.
"We quickly realized that with Zapier, we could shave months of work down to hours or minutes, and we could do it without touching our scarcest resource: developer hours."
The team then quickly implemented Zapier and trained Brightspot's sales engineers and product managers on the tool. Which was easy.
"The Zapier interface is so simple and easy to understand," said James. "You use simplified language to explain things and make each step in the builder simple. In this space, your competitors make this much more challenging—making it daunting to non-developers."
Results: Hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars saved
With Zapier on their side, folks from across Brightspot can create, test, and deploy third-party integrations in under an hour. All without code or developers.
James said, "We had a customer who we had written an integration for with one specific CRM, and not long after it was complete, they called us to say they switched to a different CRM. In our old world, that would have been a two-month timeline to rebuild—with Zapier, it was five minutes."
This adds up fast. By handling the authentication, authorization, and API management for thousands of third-party applications, Zapier is saving Brightspot hundreds of hours annually in maintenance and tens of thousands of dollars in resources.
Better yet, Brightspot developers can now focus on creating specialized bespoke integrations that need their expertise—the kind of work that excites and fulfills them.
