Almost every painful integration we are called in to fix went wrong in the same place: nobody decided which system was allowed to be right.
Question one: what is the source of truth?
For each field, which system wins when they disagree? The website has a phone number, the CRM has a different one, someone edited both last Tuesday. Without a rule, the last write wins and your data quietly degrades.
Decide this field by field, write it down, and build to it. It is more important than which CRM you chose.
Question two: which direction does data flow?
- One way, website to CRM. Simplest and usually enough. Leads in, nothing back.
- One way, CRM to website. For showing stock, pricing or availability from a system of record.
- Two way. Powerful, and where conflicts live. Only build it when a real workflow needs it.
Most businesses ask for two-way and need one-way. The difference in build cost is substantial and the difference in ongoing pain is larger.
Question three: what happens when it fails?
The CRM will be unavailable at some point, or will reject a record for a reason nobody anticipated. If the integration is naive, your website loses the enquiry and nobody finds out.
A queue, a retry policy and an alert turn an invisible loss into a delayed delivery. This is not optional engineering, it is the difference between an integration and a liability. The scope is under API and integrations.
Question four: who is notified, and how?
In the UAE the answer is often WhatsApp rather than email, and the response time expectation is minutes. If your integration dutifully creates a CRM record that nobody opens until tomorrow, it has not solved the actual problem.
Map the human workflow before the technical one. The integration exists to get a person to respond faster, not to move a row between databases.
Test the connection before estimating the project
Every CRM has an API. Not every CRM instance behaves like its documentation, especially after years of custom fields and workflow rules. We prototype the connection before quoting anything built on top of it, and occasionally that prototype changes the whole recommendation.