When there’s no native integration between your CRM and your phone system, a common solution is to turn to an automation platform like Zapier, Make or the entertainingly-titled If This Then That (IFTTT). These tools have a bold promise: connect literally anything to anything and build your perfect integration, all in one platform.

Unfortunately, when it comes to phone systems and CRMs, the reality of using Zapier doesn’t live up to the promise.

“But”, I hear you say, “you’re only saying this because you make a tool that connects CRMs to phone systems! You’re biased.”

But it’s actually the other way round! If Zapier and its kin worked flawlessly, there would be no problem and we wouldn’t have been inspired to create Kallio.

So this post isn’t just explaining why Kallio is better; it’s explaining a bit about why we built it in the first place!

The main event

The fundamental problem is that Zapier is an automation platform built around events.

When this happens, do that.

This makes it incredibly powerful and versatile, while remaining (relatively!) easy to understand. Seriously, the number of things you can do with Zapier is mind-blowing. But when you start to use it for syncing data, you start to run into one serious problem: if the integration ever fails, your data will always be out of sync. Why?

Let’s think back to how Zapier works: when this happens, do that.

When you make a call in Dialpad, log the call in Attio.

When you add a new contact in HubSpot, create a contact in Dialpad.

When a call is completed in JustCall, log it against the contact in Pipedrive.

But tools like Zapier aren’t perfect. If the automation fails – and it will do, because real life is messy and unpredictable and bugs (despite the best efforts of talented software engineers) sometimes slip through – then that call log, that contact update, is lost.

A Zapier-based integration has no capacity to correct for errors or dropped data. Once the event has passed, that’s it. No second chances.

Kallio, on the other hand, is resilient to these kinds of failures because it is built specifically to connect phone systems and CRMs, so it’s not limited to just tracking events. Crucially, it can periodically check historical data to make sure everything is in sync, so if a call log ever does get dropped it’s not lost forever, only until the next sync.

The trouble with history

This neatly leads us to another shortcoming of event-based integrations: what happens to historical data, before the integration was set up?

The short answer is: nothing.

Those calls have already happened, so the events will never be triggered, so the data will stay locked away. This means that if you want to see your communication history with a given customer across email, chat and phone, you’ll often have to check two places: your CRM and your phone system. But the whole point of the integration was to make it so you only ever have to check one place!

Same thing happens if you make a change to your integration, for example by adding an extra field to a call log. Only new calls made or received after this change will get the new data.

As you might have guessed, Kallio solves this problem too! Since it’s syncing all data not just listening for events, historical data gets synced automatically so you can be confident all your call data has been stored.

Simplicity, support and predictable pricing

Let’s finish up with a few other miscellaneous drawbacks to Zapier-based integrations, and how Kallio addresses them.

First: simplicity. Zapier is a complex product that does a huge amount; using it to connect your phone system to your CRM means getting your head round how it works. Every connector works differently, and it’s up to you to build your own integration. Powerful, but unwieldy. With Kallio you connect your CRM, connect your phone system and… that’s it. Because we’re single-mindedly focused on this particular problem, you don’t need to know how it works or think about zaps or triggers, fields or fallbacks. We can handle it all for you.

Second: support. With Zapier, you build the integration yourself, so they have limited ability to help you if something goes wrong. And the connectors that let Zapier talk to other systems, like CRMs, are built and maintained by other companies, not by Zapier itself. Zapier’s support staff are automation experts, sure, but they don’t know the nuances of different phone systems and CRMs, and they can’t fix a connector if it’s not working right, so the buck gets passed to HubSpot or Aircall or whoever built it. At Kallio, on the other hand, we built the whole system, front to back. If something goes wrong it’s our job to fix it, and fix it we will.

Finally: pricing. Automation platforms differ in exactly how they charge, but often based on event quotas. This makes pricing unpredictable: if your salespeople make more calls, you pay more. Kallio, on the other hand, has a flat monthly rate: you know exactly how much you’ll pay each month, no surprises.

Wrapping up

Using Zapier for syncing data between tools reminds me a little of the phrase “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Zapier does so much, and is so versatile and powerful, that it’s tempting to use it for all sorts of things.

And yes, many problems can indeed be solved with a hammer! But if you’re building a house, you’ll probably want a few more tools in the toolbox.

Kallio, by contrast, is a much more specialised tool. It does one thing, and it does it well. Think of it less like a hammer, more like a spirit level: not useful for everything, but indispensable for the job it’s designed for.

Yes, we’re biased. But we really do think that if you need to keep track of phone calls in your CRM, you’re much better off using a dedicated tool that does just that, rather than trying to cobble something together with a generic automation tool.

If you’d like to see how Kallio handles the integration between your phone system and CRM, get in touch – we’d love to show you how it works.