Goal

In this article, we explain what the possibilities are regarding integrating external systems with the Customer Data Platform, and what to do when you want to set up such an integration.

Who can it help?

- Customer Success Managers
- Technical consultants
- Account managers
- Customers

Why would you want to set up such an integration?

With the integration of the Customer Data Platform (CDP) and external systems, you can enrich your CM.com solution. The CDP is the data center of your CM.com solution and with the integration of other solutions, your CDP profiles will be provided with more and richer information, for example when enriching profiles with data from your CRM or ERP system.

By using the CDP, you can automate campaigns or send new web requests based on trigger events like the examples above using multi-step workflows. Therefore, you can enrich the customer journey based on the information you have centrally gathered about your customers.

How can we integrate?

Within the CDP, we have mutliple options to integratie with an external system. We can either use a HTTP POST call or the polling mechanism.

HTTP POST call
The first and the most common integration, is a HTTP POST call. The external system can implement one of our endpoints, which can be used to send an API POST call with a JSON body.

The endpoint is build up out of a base URL, tentant id, and event type id. Besides this, the authentication is a static token and can be added in either the headers or query parameters. The template for an endpoint can be found below:

https://api.cm.com/events/v1.0/tenants/[TenantID]/events/[EventTypeID]?X-CM-PRODUCTTOKEN=[token]

Requirements:
- HTTP POST call
- JSON body

Polling
The second option is to connect to an external system by using the polling adapter. The polling adapter retrieves data by sending HTTP GET requests multiple times a day based on a given time interval.
For example: you want to retrieve data each hour. Our polling mechanism will send a HTTP GET call every hour, receiving all new data of the past hour in the response.

Requirements:
- HTTP GET request
- Static authentication token
- Time interval can be stated in query parameters
- JSON body

What is required to enable these integrations?

To investigate whether an integration between CDP and an external system is possible, the help of Professional Services is always required by setting up an intake. During an intake, the customer's need will be explained and it will be checked whether it is possible to:

• technically integrate with the external system involved, and

• fulfill the need of the customer when integrating with the external system involved

After an intake, there are 3 different scenarios:

• the customer's need can not be fulfilled, and/or the desired integration between CDP and external system is not technically feasible

• an investigation project will be set up to further research the possibilities of the desired integration, in case that there is positive probability, but no guarantee, on integrating CDP with the external system. When the outcome of the investigation project is that the integration is possible, the PS plan quotation can be set up afterwards.

• it can be said that integrating is possible (guaranteed), and a PS plan quotation will be provided based on the scope discussed during the intake. After that, a Prof. Services Consultant will help implementing the integration.