When a sync fails, who finds out?

Full Fabric holds the student lifecycle for a university: recruitment, admissions, student records, payments and communications. An institution that also runs a CRM expects the two to agree.

An integration between them already existed.

For one enterprise customer it stopped short. It did not carry every entity and field they relied on.

The second problem was quieter. When a record failed to synchronize, staff had no easy way to inspect what had happened.

Discovery

With the customer: what the two systems had to agree on, and why.

Requirements

Synchronization of additional records, custom field and entity mapping, and consent-related data.

Failure visibility

How conflicts and failures surface, and the sync-management interface that shows them.

Refinement

The changes that followed, driven by what the customer told us after release.

Extending the field mapping was only half the job. Customers also needed somewhere to read the sync logs and fix mapping issues themselves.

Two things constrained it: the deadline, and the limits of the customer's CRM.

I chose to build a Sync Management dashboard: one central place for failures, instead of more email in the customer's inbox.

The cost was internal initiatives we pushed back. We got that time back later, once customer success no longer had to troubleshoot each failure alongside the customer.

I judged it on customer feedback, fewer support tickets and adoption of the integration.

The integration synchronizes more records than before, supports custom field and entity mapping, and carries consent data.

A sync-management interface shows conflicts and failures, so staff can see which records did not go through.

Make each failure actionable: say exactly what to fix, not only that something went wrong.

• Enterprise integrations
• Data synchronization
• Field mapping
• Consent and compliance
• Operational visibility
• Customer discovery