Data synchronizations are a fundamental part of your integrations, whether it’s integrations between your internal applications or between your product and a 3rd-party application (i.e. a product integration). 

To help you understand how data synchronizations can work and to help you build them effectively, we’ll provide a comprehensive definition of the concept and break down various use cases.

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What is data synchronization?

It’s the continual process of keeping certain fields in two or more applications consistent. The data syncs can run on a specific cadence, from every minute to every 24 hours, and they can either work in one direction or bidirectionally.

Note: A one-way sync means that when data in the source system gets added, edited, or removed, the corresponding changes take place in the destination system(s). However, if any changes take place in the destination system, the source system is unaffected. A bidirectional sync, on the other hand, allows for both source and destination systems to be affected when changes occur in either.

Related: What is API integration middleware?

Examples of data synchronization

You can build data synchronizations that let you add newly-closed accounts to your ticketing tool, escalate tickets to engineering, and add candidates who’ve signed their offer letter to your HRIS.

Let’s explore these use cases, in addition to a few others, in more detail:

Add accounts to your ticketing tool 

Once a prospect converts to a client, you’ll need to add them to your ticketing tool so that your support and/or customer success team can become aware of them and begin creating tickets for onboarding them.

To that end, you can integrate a CRM like SugarCRM with a ticketing tool like Zendesk and build the following one-way data synchronization: Any time an opportunity is marked as closed-won in the CRM, the account gets added in the ticketing tool. You can pick and choose the fields you want to add, such as the company name, subscription they purchased, contacts at the account, and so on.

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Related: Common examples of API integration

Keep tickets across your teams in sync

As your support team identifies issues that require support from engineering, they’ll need a quick and easy way to alert them of the issue, along with all the context needed to address it. 

You can help facilitate this by integrating the tool your customer support team uses to manage tickets (e.g. Gorgias) with the tool your engineers use (e.g. GitHub), and then building the following bidirectional sync: Any time a ticket gets escalated by support, the ticket gets created in engineering’s ticketing tool with certain fields—like notes on the issue—getting synced over. And as engineering works through the issue and makes changes to the ticket, the ticket in the support team’s tool gets updated accordingly—all but ensuring that they’re kept in the loop. 

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Create employee profiles in your HRIS

Once a candidate has signed their offer letter, your HR and IT teams need to work quickly in executing all of the necessary pre-boarding tasks (e.g. purchasing and setting up their office equipment). Completing these tasks by the new hire’s start date ensures the new hire can hit the ground running and it gives them a positive first impression of your company. 

To help IT and HR, you can integrate your ATS (e.g. Greenhouse) with your HRIS (BambooHR) and implement a one-way sync where any time a candidate is marked as hired in the former, their profile gets created in the latter. In addition, certain fields from their candidate profile are synced with their profile in the HR system, such as their full name, job title, department, and address.  

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Provision and deprovision users in your product

Say you’re looking to build a product integration between your clients’ HRIS solutions and your product in order to sync employees. This will allow your users to avoid having to manually provision and deprovision users, which is not only tedious but can also lead to costly human errors (e.g. clients’ former employees can still access your application).

You can tackle this integration scenario by connecting your product with your clients’ HRIS solutions and building a sync where any time an employee profile in a client’s HRIS is added, modified, or removed, the corresponding changes are made in their instance of your product. 

Sync leads between your product and your clients’ CRM systems

Imagine you offer a sales automation solution that recommends leads to sales reps and allows them to take specific actions on those leads within your app. 

To ensure that the reps’ actions in your product are easily visible to their managers and others, you can connect your product with clients’ CRM solutions and build the following syncs: any time your product recommends a lead, the rep can see if it already exists in their CRM within your product. If it doesn’t, the rep can accept it (which creates a corresponding opportunity in your CRM) and take specific actions (which would be recorded in the CRM’s associated opportunity).

Implement product integrations at scale with Merge

Building and maintaining integrations with, say, 1 or 2 HRIS solutions or CRM systems, might be sustainable. But as your customer base grows, so too will the number of integration requests that come in.

To help you build and maintain product integrations at scale, you can leverage Merge, the leading unified API solution. Using Merge’s Unified API, you can build to a single API and access hundreds of integrations across key software categories, including HRIS, CRM, ATS, file storage, ticketing, accounting, and marketing automation. 

You can learn more about Merge by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.