Information is one of the most valuable assets of a company, especially when it's information about the contacts, prospects, and customers that bring revenue to the business.
However, customer data isn't always easy to manage... in fact, it can get unruly real quick, especially considering that the average small business is using 102 different apps, many of which collect different types of data.
Each of these apps adds more power to your SaaS stack – such as marketing automation functionality, or omnichannel customer support – but these apps aren't always working together or communicating data changes between them.
As your business grows and higher volumes of data flow in, if you don't have good contact management processes in place you'll probably face these data headaches:
- Data silos, or data that's inaccessible to parts of your organization
- Duplicate contacts from double data entry
- Conflicting data in different apps, without knowing which one is correct
One of the biggest challenges for strong business operations is unifying customer data in all apps across the business. For this, you need syncing.
What makes a sync intelligent?
There are several ways you can move data between your apps. You could do a manual CSV import and export, but that can be a real headache. Many apps offer native integrations, but these can be very inflexible and only sync data in one direction (from App A to App B, but not back again).
When it comes to intelligently syncing your contact data between apps, there are a few things you should look for:
- Two-way synchronization
- Real-time updates
- If-this-then-that conditional logic
- Customizable field mapping
A two-way sync guarantees that these four things connect your apps. An iPaaS, or Integration Platform as a Service, which sits between your apps to act as the traffic warden for data flow:
How to Implement Intelligent Data Syncing
iPaaS synchronizes contacts between cloud apps bidirectionally and in real-time. This means that whenever a customer's information is added or modified in one app, the change is automatically synced to the other one.
You can sync:
- Contact data
- Lead data
- And for some apps, company data
When you set up the sync, you create if-this-then-that rules to determine exactly what data should flow where. You can also banish conflicting data before it happens by choosing which app is more reliable when setting up your sync.
It's easy to maintain your segmentation for sales, marketing, and support to ensure nothing is lost when you sync data between your apps. For example, passing on segmentation data from your CRM to an email marketing tool means you can seamlessly create highly personalized emailing campaigns per industry, location, type of contact, or list.
You could sync contacts between Insightly CRM and Mailchimp, where you hold your mailing list, and customize which conditions or filters to apply to the sync:
How about creating a connection between a billing software and a CRM? The condition could be: if a contact is in my billing software and it's in a high revenue group, then sync the contact to my CRM and tag them as a VIP client.
Endless sync combinations like these can help your business to maximize the value of the SaaS stack you invest in – and receive the highest impact from your customer data with better marketing, sales, and support experiences.
