In a nutshell, the ultimate purpose of integration in CRM is to enable various software components, or data sources, to link together and produce the desired business outcome in the form of new or enhanced customer data in CRM. This data will be used to improve customer processes across the company and in all interactions with the client. It will also be used to manage other business areas, such as product development and reporting.

In this chapter, I explained that while defining the integration strategy, the project teams should carefully choose the integration approach and select the best technique(s) in order to ensure deliverability and feasibility of integration. Integration can happen at different levels, such as data integration, application integration, or business process integration. Each of these methods has emerged to address specific requirements and can be used alone or combined in a single implementation.

The process of defining an integration strategy should start...