“Microapps have helped us create a tool that is much faster than what is currently on the market, with very easy data input. It’s a game changer in the lead generation workflow for financial advisors.” — Cyrus Hurley, President, Zuryc

Citrix’s recent rebranding highlights our dedication to providing the best employee experience and to helping our customers give their people the space they need to do their best work. The shift from feature-focused products to people-focused innovations is paving the path to the future.

I want to focus on one capability of Citrix Workspace — microapps — and how we enabled Zuryc, a leading Citrix Service Provider (CSP), to differentiate its offering and take a custom microapp to market. If you are new to microapps, check out the video below and this blog post for a quick overview.

Zuryc is a North Carolina-based CSP that specializes in the financial, government, and healthcare verticals. It offers a custom-built financial advisor app called PlanFacts that enables advisors to create life goals and financial plans for clients.

Why do I bring this up?

Because Zuryc is one of the first CSPs to build and take to market a Citrix Ready microapp integration with its’ custom software.

Let’s look at a real-world example of how Zuryc enables financial advisors to help their clients and how microapps make the Zuryc offering even more powerful and creates a better employee experience for their customers. Focusing on the daily task of lead generation in building retirement plans, I will show some of the time saving and productivity gains Zuryc has made because of the microapp integration.

Before the Microapp Integration

A financial advisor might need to decide if a client should convert their existing qualified plan to a Roth IRA. They would log in to Citrix Workspace, launch the PlanFacts SaaS app leveraging the Citrix Workspace’s SSO capabilities, create a new lead in the system for the potential client, navigate to the retirement plan screen within the software, go through a series of windows and clicks to input the relevant financial information about the lead, and submit the form, which generates a Roth conversion plan as a PDF. They would use this PDF to sell the lead on their services.

While it’s great that the financial advisor can access PlanFacts securely from anywhere, on any device, we want to optimize this task further. After all, the financial advisor executes this task thousands of times a year.

After the Microapp Integration

The financial advisor logs into Citrix Workspace but now doesn’t need to launch the full PlanFacts SaaS app. Instead, they click the Roth Conversion microapp in the Actions pane at the top right of their screen. A sleek “card” appears asking for the relevant information needed to create the retirement plan. After submitting the form, the lead is created in the PlanFacts database, and the Roth conversion PDF is returned within a few seconds.

The financial advisor did not have to launch the full PlanFacts app and fumble through many different windows just to create one lead. Completing this task from a single screen, in a streamlined fashion, is exactly the type of user experience and optimization we are aiming for with “people-centric” technology.

Here is a video comparison of the user experience for a financial advisor before and after the microapp integration.

Creating retirement plans is a task that financial advisors complete thousands of times per year, and Zuryc’s microapp integrations have enabled employees to optimize this process by up to 50 percent and make the most of their time by minimizing context switching.

“Microapps have helped us create a tool that is much faster than what is currently on the market, with very easy data input,” says Cyrus Hurley, President, Zuryc. “It’s a game changer in the lead generation workflow for financial advisors.”

In the future, Zuryc plans to build more microapp integrations for financial lead-generation tasks such as disability insurance or Social Security reports within the PlanFacts SaaS app.

The Technology in Play

Zuryc used the microapp builder interface in Citrix Cloud and the existing PlanFacts APIs to create the integration. Via a simple UI, they chose the required data inputs and did some light coding to integrate their existing APIs. Once an employee submits the microapp, the APIs are initiated and respond to the data population request. You can find more technical info on the microapp solution, including onboarding steps and reference architectures, here.

Improving user productivity, streamlining processes, reducing context switching, and optimizing menial tasks is the people-focused business value we are driving toward at Citrix. The microapps capability within Citrix Workspace is helping us get there.

We already have out-of-the-box microapp template integrations for some of the biggest SaaS providers that you can implement today to improve your customers’ experience and productivity. This technology presents a massive opportunity for our CSP and ISV communities.

Through our partner community, we have virtually every vertical covered. We know there are thousands of industry-specific apps out there and that each likely has numerous tedious tasks being executed by employees every day. Every one of those tasks is an opportunity for optimization. Microapps can enable our partners to differentiate their offerings, create custom actions for customers’ everyday tasks, and market themselves as a leader in their vertical or industry. If you are an ISV or MSP with a specialization in a niche application, the Citrix Service Provider organization can help you create your own custom microapp integration and get it listed in the Citrix Ready MicroApp Marketplace.

In Q3, we invited some of our CSPs to a complementary, virtual, instructor-led microapps training from Layer8 Training, which we plan to repeat. Reach out to your CSP Partner Account Manager or CSP Citrix Sales Engineer to secure a spot in a future training or to get help taking a microapp to market.