For Chris Haleua, former VP of Product at GUIDEcx, Friday nights used to mean one thing: troubleshooting integrations.

When customers couldn't extract logs from complex systems, support tickets piled up, and engineers spent hours debugging connection hiccups. "I heard the phrase 'bane of my existence' at a conference, and that's exactly how I would describe some of our integrations in the past," Chris recalls.

Integrations were both a technical headache and a strategic burden. Customers needed to connect dozens of systems, and with limited engineering resources, GUIDEcx faced an impossible choice: say "no" to integration requests or drown in custom dev work.

The company initially tried solving the problem by building all integrations in-house as a managed service. But it wasn’t sustainable. Engineers became buried not just in creating APIs, but in the many unique ways customers wanted to use those APIs. Development slowed to a crawl, with new integrations taking six months or more to deliver. The backlog grew while competitors moved faster.

GUIDEcx existed to help businesses accelerate time-to-value, yet their own integration challenges were creating the exact opposite experience for customers. The company needed a way to let engineers focus on core product development while still meeting the growing demand for connectivity.

Embedding Workato directly into their platform changed GUIDEcx's entire approach. Instead of building every integration for their customers, they could empower customers to build integrations themselves.

The partnership grew over time. Workato initially worked in the background, labeling tiles for systems like Jira as "powered by Workato." But everything changed when GUIDEcx brought Workato out from behind the curtain, fully embedding it as part of their premium offering.

Suddenly, customers could map fields, customize logic, and build complex workflows at their own pace. The transformation was immediate and significant.

"It was like we crowdsourced development," Chris says. "I had a totally new roadmap to work from. Our coverage of different systems we integrate with and all the ways people wanted to customize recipes just accelerated so much faster."

The impact showed up immediately in sales conversations. GUIDEcx went from promising delivery six months out to saying "yes” immediately.

By embedding Workato, GUIDEcx has achieved a 15% higher win rate among larger prospects with complex integration requirements. They’ve also seen 20% higher average contract values (ACV), as clients know GUIDEcx can scale with their needs.

But for Chris, "those figures pale in comparison to the number one thing I'm focused on: retention," he says. Customer retention has jumped 25% year-over-year.

In his words, customers stick around longer because they're more deeply integrated. "An integrated customer is a sticky customer," Chris explains. "The more they work with Workato, the more we can count on them staying and growing with us."

The self-serve model freed GUIDEcx’s engineers to focus on core product work, while Workato’s transparency allowed customers to manage integrations independently, laying a strong foundation for further growth in integrated systems and customer engagement.