The commonest version of this problem: an enquiry arrives on the website, somebody reads it, and then types it into the CRM by hand. It works until it does not, and nobody notices which records were missed.
Manual re-entry costs hours, but the real damage is subtler. Two systems holding slightly different versions of the same customer means nobody trusts either of them, so people start keeping their own spreadsheet, and within a year the CRM is a record of what somebody got round to entering rather than what actually happened.
Integration fixes the trust problem as much as the time problem. When the website writes directly into the CRM, the CRM is the answer rather than one of several candidates.
What makes these projects succeed or fail is almost never the code. It is whether the two systems agree on what a customer is — which fields are required, what happens when an email address already exists, and which side wins when both have been edited.
What we do
Working UK-wide — directly with businesses, and white label behind design and marketing agencies.
Discuss a projectMoving data between two systems is straightforward. Deciding what should happen in the awkward cases is the work.
Working out which field on one side corresponds to which on the other, and what to do about the ones with no counterpart. Usually the first thing that reveals the two systems were set up by different people with different assumptions.
What happens when somebody enquires twice, or uses a different email address. Matching on email alone is the default and it is wrong often enough to matter.
One-way into the CRM is simpler and covers most cases. Two-way means deciding which side wins a conflict, and that is a business decision rather than a technical one.
When the CRM is unavailable, the enquiry still has to go somewhere. We queue and retry rather than losing it, because an integration that silently drops records is worse than no integration.
Most CRM APIs cap how many calls you can make. Fine day to day, a problem during a bulk import, and the kind of thing worth discovering in testing.
A log of what synced and what did not, readable by somebody who is not a developer. Otherwise the first sign of trouble is a customer asking why nobody called back.
Mainstream platforms have documented APIs and it is routine. Older or heavily customised systems sometimes do not, and then the honest answer is a scheduled export rather than live sync. We establish which you have before quoting.
Syncing a messy CRM gives you a messy CRM that updates faster. If there are duplicate records now, they are worth sorting before rather than after.
Someone has to care when the sync log shows errors. Integrations rarely break loudly; they drift, and drift is only caught by somebody looking.
A lot of our work is delivered white label or under agreement, so these describe the problem and the approach rather than naming the client.
A membership website for payroll professionals, with member benefits and book sales, kept in step with the client’s CRM by a bespoke two-way API integration.
Web application · IntegrationAn API-connected membership platform handling publications, events and a two-way CRM sync — thousands of profiles and hundreds of transactions a week.
Portal · Ecommerce · MigrationAn industrial-scale ordering portal migrated off a legacy platform, with client authentication, advanced search and form-to-CRM integration.
The website, the CRM, and what you want to stop doing by hand. We will tell you whether it is straightforward, what it would involve, and if the honest answer is a scheduled export rather than live sync, we will say so.