In today’s business landscape, companies utilize a multitude of applications for various functions such as Sales, HR, Finance, Operations, and Service to improve operational efficiency. While these applications address specific business challenges, the lack of communication between them creates a siloed architecture, resulting in fragmented customer information.

Salesforce plays a pivotal role in resolving this issue by serving as a centralized location for customer data. Integrating Salesforce with existing platforms seamlessly enables the flow of information between different applications. This integration not only enhances data accessibility and accuracy but also fosters a more cohesive and connected ecosystem.

By consolidating customer data within Salesforce, businesses can gain a holistic view of their customers, leading to improved customer experiences and better-informed decision-making. The integration ensures that relevant data is readily available to various departments, promoting collaboration and efficiency across the organization.

Ultimately, the seamless integration of Salesforce with other applications empowers businesses to harness the full potential of their technology stack, streamline processes, and deliver exceptional value to both customers and stakeholders.

There could be following specific use cases to build the integration: Data Synchronization + Process Automation + Streamlined Workflow + Enhanced Customer Experience + Third-Party Applications + Reporting & Analytics etc. Here are some known common challenges that is faced while integration with Salesforce.

1. Data Mapping & Transformation

Most crucial part of the integration is data mapping – specifically encountered due to conflict of data type, field type and Salesforce limitation. For example, the address fields in Salesforce must be given as street, state, city, etc. but the other application may not have the exact same fields. Writing code in such scenarios could become an additional effort making data mapping a tedious job.

So it’s important to map the data points correctly and do the conversion of data to be supported by Salesforce.

2. Duplicate Data

Duplicate records are a challenge faced by all companies that lead to bad data. It’s important that you have a system that identifies and limits the entry of duplicate data during integration.

When importing custom objects, Case, or Lead, you can use external IDs (a custom field marked as Unique and External on field level) to prevent the import from creating duplicate records. When you chose this method, the import wizard/data loader detects existing records in Salesforce with external IDs that match those values in the import file.

For example, a company wants to integrate data between its Zendesk and Salesforce. It becomes easy for the company to refer to the Zendesk ID records within Salesforce rather than referring to Salesforce IDs. Leveraging the External ID to upsert (insert or update) the records into Salesforce helps in removing duplicate data.

3. Data Security & Privacy

Ensuring data security and privacy during integration is crucial, especially when dealing with sensitive customer information or compliance requirements. Sometimes, there are multiple systems, machines and tools are involved; so we must need to ensure data are managed by following all privacy policies and only authorized persons are managing the data.

4. API Limitations

There may be some API limits at any end of integration. For example,

• Salesforce API limits can impact the frequency and volume of data transfers due to standard governor limits.
• If integration do some kind of file upload and that file size exceed the limit

There could be several such cases where we need to plan carefully to avoid these limits.

5. System Downtime and Performance

• Integration processes can impact system performance and may lead to temporary downtime if not properly managed.
• In case of downtime or performance degradation, communicate proactively and setup a workaround process for the time being.

6. Real-time Data Sync must adhere Salesforce Data validation Rules

Real-time data synchronization between Salesforce and other systems may present challenges due to potential delays or data conflicts like:

• A validation rule may be causing failure of data update.
• A wrong data type mapping could be causing error while synchronization.
• Sync may be pushing bad data, observe the synced data frequently.

Identify the real-time data sync use cases vs one time job or daily sync – It is a wrong assumption to think that importing or exporting of data from Salesforce is the same as real-time integration. Usually import/export of records run as batches and data may not be immediately synced compared to real-time integration. Hence, Salesforce/external applications would be out-of-sync for some time until executing the batch.

7. Choosing a right implementation partner

Overcoming these challenges requires careful planning, collaboration among stakeholders, and leveraging the expertise of integration specialists. So it’s very crucial to work with a experienced vendor/experts who do understand these challenges and be able to solve these seamlessly.

With a successful track record of over 20 integration and migration projects, our team of experts is well-equipped to cater to your specific needs. We are eager to listen to your requirements and provide tailored solutions to address your unique challenges.

Whether you need assistance with system integration, data migration, or any other related project, our experienced professionals are ready to guide you through the process and ensure a seamless and efficient implementation.

Feel free to reach out to us, and we’ll be delighted to discuss your project and collaborate on delivering the best solution for your business. Contact us today, and let’s embark on this journey together towards achieving your integration and migration goals.