Once the data, processes, and organizational issues have been clarified, and all stakeholders are on board, there are technical design decisions to be made by architects on how to best import or integrate these data and processes into your CRM system.

As described earlier in this chapter, one common approach to integrate data with a CRM platform is transferring customer data between systems using file transfer. This method is easy to implement because almost all modern CRM platforms support the import and export of data using files.

It's important to note that not all data managers approve of this, as they prefer to use an API-based approach. In this approach, the CRM solution, and other systems, will put the data into a file at a shared location for others to be able to use the extract-transform-load (ETL) method to load the data when needed and as agreed upon.

This method has been around for years, and many sophisticated tools, such as SQL Server Integration...