Green and energy efficiency household products

What the Company Do

A quicker and easier way to transfer information from their Zoho system to an external organisation’s appointment booking system than the manual and time-wasting data re-entry method they were forced to use, with its attendant risk of mistyping and information discrepancies

What did we do

We’d extensively worked with CRM integration with other systems before and knew that Zoho had good support for Web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

We spent time looking at the external system and quickly built a close working realtionship with the external organisation and established their system had a Web API, but a different protocol standard to Zoho (SOAP vs REST)

After extensive investigation with API “experts” and several “can’t be dones” we refused to accept the popular and commonly held belief that Zoho could not communicate with a SOAP API without VERY expensive interim REST to SOAP translation services and stubbornly searched for a better solution.

We built another very close working relationship with and used their HTTP monitoring solution to essentially reverse engineer the traffic between Zoho and the external system and figure a way to make it work.

This investigation work was on our time and when we KNEW we could do this, we produced a project plan and fixed price quote for the customer, based on what the actual work would cost, which was a fraction of the quotes we’d received to do the same work.

Everything worked “out of the box/cloud” and the customer was DELIGHTED 🙂

How did it help them

A very happy Win/WIn/WIn result!

The customer got the complete functionality they required (plus more and FASTER) – the data is now transferred instantaneously and completely behind the scenes the instant the “Save” button is clicked in Zoho.

We learned some new and valuable skills. AND the whole project cost the customer less than the quoted cost of JUST the interim REST to SOAP converter