System of record
Define ownership for customer, contact, activity, commercial and consent data before connecting systems.
Open reference architecture
CRM Integration Architecture
A vendor-neutral pattern for synchronising CRM and surrounding systems without making the integration layer an undocumented source of truth.
Integration contract
Prefer documented APIs/events and versioned schemas; isolate vendor-specific mappings behind an integration boundary.
Identity resolution
Use stable identifiers and explicit matching rules; do not rely on names or email alone where collisions matter.
Event delivery
Design for retries, deduplication, idempotency, ordering assumptions and dead-letter handling.
Data quality
Validate required fields, enumerations and referential integrity; quarantine invalid records rather than silently corrupting destinations.
Security
Use least-privilege service identities, secret rotation, encrypted transport and scoped audit logging.
Migration
Rehearse extracts, transforms, reconciliation and rollback; preserve source-to-target lineage and exception reports.
Exit & portability
Document export formats, custom logic, integrations and data ownership so switching cost is understood before platform selection.