Name the handoff and its owner
Choose a specific event, such as a website enquiry becoming an assigned request in the office system. Identify the source of truth, the destination and the person responsible for exceptions. Define success as a verified destination record with the expected owner and next action. Sending a webhook or receiving an acknowledgement is not always proof that the business record exists.
Agree the data mapping
Document which source fields become which destination fields, including required values, formats, time zones and supported statuses. Decide how missing addresses, unknown service areas and changed contact details are handled. Preserve the original request identifier so staff can reconcile records. Test with authorized sample data that includes incomplete inputs, punctuation and realistic field lengths; a tidy happy-path example misses the cases staff will have to repair.
Verify access and operating limits
Confirm that each provider permits the intended integration and that the account has the required API capability. Keep access scoped to the necessary records and actions. Identify rate limits, usage costs, credential renewal and who receives a failure alert. Separate vendor costs from the development scope. A tool appearing in an integration catalog does not prove that every field or action your workflow needs is supported.
Prevent duplicates and reconcile uncertainty
The same event can arrive more than once. Define a stable event identifier and a way to recognize a previously completed action. When a request times out after the destination may have accepted it, check the original action before creating another record. Treat a safe repeat, a conflicting update and an unknown outcome as different states. Include retry limits and a manual recovery path so a broken connection cannot create an endless stream of duplicate work.
Keep failed work visible
Test a destination outage, expired access, invalid input and a temporarily slow response. Each failed handoff should retain enough context for an authorized person to understand and recover it without exposing unnecessary personal information in logs. Decide which errors retry automatically, which require correction and when a person is notified. The team needs to distinguish waiting, completed and failed work; a green automation toggle is not an operating status.
Plan the first live run and rollback
Begin with a small agreed batch or one event type. Compare source events with destination records and ask the receiving team whether the new record is actionable. Agree how to pause the integration, retain pending work and restore the previous process. Record who owns changes when a vendor alters its API or the team changes its workflow. Expand after the handoff has been observed in use, rather than adding more connected tools to compensate for unclear ownership.