By Artem Korsakov ·
In short: A website-to-CRM integration works when the manager receives the full meaning of the inquiry: the chosen service or products, the comment, the source. Rules for repeat inquiries are written together with the sales team. A transmission failure should leave a visible trace and have a responsible person. The integration is tested with test inquiries taken all the way to the required status.
A website-to-CRM integration can be considered working when the manager receives enough data and understands what to do next. The appearance of a new record confirms only one step. An inquiry may go to the wrong employee, lose the contents of the order or be left without a response.
Start with the result for the sales team. Describe who takes the inquiry, what information is needed for the first reply and how the next step is determined. Then the integration can be checked against the work done: the mere fact that two systems are connected does not show this.
Pass on the meaning of the inquiry
A contact and a name are often not enough. If the visitor chose a service, product, branch or configuration, the manager needs that choice. Asking the person to repeat information they have already filled in means losing the benefit of the form. The record should keep the original wording of the request and the information needed to reply.
In a hypothetical equipment catalog, a buyer adds three items with quantities and attaches a comment about the delivery deadline. Passing only the phone number creates a record but destroys the buyer’s task. For this scenario, the request contents need to be passed in a way that lets an employee open them without searching in another channel.
Do not collect extra fields just to fill in the CRM. A first inquiry may not require complete information about the company. Separate the data without which the request cannot be processed from the information a manager clarifies in conversation. The budget also depends on the set of data passed; more in the article on the cost of integration.
Agree on repeat inquiries
A visitor may press the button again, come back a week later or ask about a different service. These are different situations. If everything is automatically merged by phone number, a new task may end up inside an old closed deal. If a separate record is always created, the sales team gets duplicates.
Write down the rules together with a manager. For example, a technical repeat of the same submission does not create a second request, while a new request from an existing customer is saved as a separate inquiry. Searching for a similar contact and deciding on a new task are worth keeping separate. The rule should follow how the team works, even if it is inconvenient for a particular connector.
The source helps analyze the customer’s path
For analysis, the following are useful:
- the page the form was sent from;
- the time;
- the chosen offer;
- available information about the referral source.
Advertising tags let you link an inquiry to a campaign if they were present and saved correctly. Their absence cannot automatically be treated as organic search: the source may have been unknown.
Check which data survives navigation between pages and a repeat visit. Agree on which fields staff can change and which keep their original value. If a manager manually rewrites the source, a later report may explain the manager’s actions rather than the visitor’s original path.
A failure should leave a visible trace
What happens if the CRM is temporarily unavailable? In an agreed solution, the inquiry is saved in a predefined way, the error becomes visible to the responsible person, and retransmission does not create extra records. The specific mechanism may vary, but an inquiry silently disappearing cannot be considered an acceptable result.
A backup notification is useful, but it does not replace control over processing. A message may land in an unused chat or get lost in email. Specify who checks errors and how they confirm that the exchange has been restored. Otherwise the technical log will exist separately from the people who are supposed to act.
The transfer of personal data should also follow the company’s agreed process. Check with the people responsible which fields are actually needed, where they are stored and who has access. A technical connection is not in itself confirmation of compliance with applicable requirements.
Check leads together with sales
A test set:
- test inquiries from a phone and a computer;
- submissions from different pages;
- a form with optional fields left blank;
- a repeat submission;
- an already known phone number;
- an attachment and cart contents.
Then take the inquiry through a manager’s normal reply to the required status.
Before ordering a trike_dev integration, prepare a sample form and a sample of the record an employee should receive. This will let you discuss the exact result and the boundaries of the work.
Частые вопросы ### Can you make do with a ready-made connector?
Yes, if it passes the necessary data and matches your rules for repeats and errors. A complex catalog or several departments will require additional setup.