Website integrations: what to connect first, and what to leave alone

A client of ours had built himself a proper little machine. Enquiry comes in through the site, lands in his CRM, copies down to a spreadsheet, pings the team in Slack, fires off a welcome email with his availability in it. He was pleased with it, and honestly he had every right to be. Most businesses his size are still copying phone numbers into a notepad.

I asked how many enquiries he'd had the previous month. He pulled up the CRM: fourteen. Then, mostly out of curiosity, we opened the inbox the form used to send to, which he'd left switched on and stopped reading months earlier.

Nineteen.

Five enquiries had gone through the form, died somewhere in the chain, and just never appeared. He'd been running that way for a while. Nobody noticed, because the entire point of the machine was that he'd stopped watching.

The value of an integration is that you stop checking

That's the sales pitch and it's true. The reason to connect your website to the tools you run on is so the data only gets typed once, by the customer, and then goes where it needs to go while you're up a ladder or in someone's kitchen. It's real time saved. I'm not about to argue against it, we build these for people.

It's also the whole problem, and I don't think anybody says this part out loud.

When your form just emails you, a failure is loud. Two weeks of silence and you start poking at it. When your form pushes into six systems, a failure is quiet, because five of them are still working perfectly and the one that stopped is the one holding the record you'd have used to notice. You don't get an alert. You get a slightly thinner month and a vague sense that the market's gone soft.

So the way I'd think about integrations now is less "what can we connect" and more "what will tell me when this breaks".

Connect the thing that touches a lead, then stop for a bit

There's a long catalogue of things you can wire up, and we keep ours on the website integrations page if you want to see the range. It's all real and we've built most of it.

But the order matters more than the list, and the order almost nobody uses is: one connection, the one that carries an enquiry to the place you will genuinely look at every day, and then nothing else for a couple of months.

For a lot of small businesses that first connection isn't even a CRM. It's making the enquiry arrive somewhere shared instead of in one person's mailbox, and making it countable while you're there. If you're a two-person operation and the CRM you bought is a place you visit when you remember to, connecting the form to it has made things worse, not better. You've moved your leads somewhere you don't go.

Bookings come second, if you sell time. That one has an obvious tell that it's working, which is that your calendar fills without phone tag, so it's safe to trust.

Payments and accounting come after that, and only if re-typing invoices is currently costing you an evening a week. Plenty of businesses connect Xero because it's on the list of things you can connect, then find they've automated eleven invoices a month.

Keep the dumb copy

This is the one piece of advice in here I'd call non-negotiable, and it's slightly embarrassing how simple it is.

Whatever clever route an enquiry takes, the form should also send a plain, ugly email to an address that more than one person reads. Every time. Not a fallback that triggers when the clever route fails, because that requires the system to know it failed, and a system that knew it had failed would have told you. An unconditional copy.

It costs nothing. It's the only thing standing between you and the situation my client was in, where the evidence that five enquiries went missing existed in exactly one place and he'd stopped opening it.

Use a shared address rather than a person's, while you're at it. Staff leave and their mailbox goes with them, and I've watched a business lose a fortnight of enquiries to a departed employee's auto-forward.

Send yourself an enquiry once a month

Put it in the diary. It takes five minutes and it is the entire maintenance regime.

Do it from your phone, on mobile data, the way a customer would, with a real phone number in it so you can see what lands. Then go and check every place it was meant to turn up. Not just the first one. The CRM, the calendar, the shared inbox, the notification. All of them.

Most automation tools keep a log of what they've actually run, which is where the answer lives when something's missing. Zapier's Zap history is a record of every workflow that has run on your account, and it's built for exactly this kind of troubleshooting. Check it after your test enquiry and you'll see whether the thing fired, errored, or never got asked.

Once a month, five minutes, and you'll never have the conversation I had with that bloke.

Every tool you connect is another copy of your customers

Worth sitting with for a second, because integration projects rarely include this conversation and they probably should.

Each connection you add is another system holding your customers' names, phone numbers, addresses and whatever else the form asks for. That's not an argument against connecting things. It is an argument for asking your form for less. If a field exists because it seemed handy at the time and nobody has ever used the answer, delete it, and you've reduced the problem to nothing.

The obligation is real, too. Under the OAIC's Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, if the Privacy Act covers your business and personal information you hold is breached in a way likely to result in serious harm, you have to notify the people affected and notify the OAIC. Worth knowing where the copies are before you'd have to go looking.

Which raises the other thing: whose account is each of these tools actually in? If the automation platform is under an ex-contractor's login, you've reproduced the ownership problem that already catches people out with their domain and hosting, only now it's sitting between your website and your enquiries.

Do the test enquiry this week

If you've got anything connected to your website, go and send yourself one now, and follow it all the way through.

Best case, it takes five minutes and everything's where it should be. Worst case, you find out today rather than in March, and you find out with a test enquiry rather than with a customer who thinks you ignored them.

We do this check as part of a free website audit, and it turns up more than you'd expect. Automations that stopped firing when someone changed a field name. Forms notifying an address that hasn't existed in two years. None of it announces itself, which is the point.