Two-way API integration: examples, benefits, and tools

As you look to sync data between internal systems or between your product and customers’ applications, you’ll need to decide whether to sync data one way or bidirectionally. 

To help you land on the better approach for any integration, we’ll cover everything you need to know about two-way API integrations, otherwise known as bidirectional integrations.

What is a two-way API integration?

It’s any integration that keeps data between two or more applications consistent over time. In other words, if data is added, removed, or updated in an application, the integrated system(s) performs the same action.

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Related: API integration best practices

Examples of two-way API integration

To help bring this definition to life, let’s cover a few common use cases:

Note: These examples will be presented as internal integrations, but they can just as easily be customer-facing. To help you imagine this, you can just swap one of the applications in an example with your product and the rest of the applications in that example with your clients’ systems.

Sync tickets between customer support and engineering

Say your customer support team occasionally receives issues that their engineers need to solve.

To help your customer support reps flag these issues to engineering on time and with ease, you can integrate your support team’s ticketing tool (e.g. Zendesk) with engineering’s (e.g. GitHub) and build the following two-way API integration: Once a ticket is marked as escalated in Zendesk, it’s automatically created in GitHub. As an engineer then edits the ticket in GitHub, the original ticket in Zendesk gets updated accordingly.

Related: Examples of API integrations

Keep employee data consistent across HR tools

Now let’s assume that you collect, store, and act on employee data in different systems. To ensure the data in each of these systems are consistent, accurate, and up-to-date, you can integrate them and sync the relevant employee fields bidirectionally. 

For example, say your teams store and edit employee information in an HRIS (e.g. Workday) and a payroll system (e.g. ADP). You can integrate these platforms and sync fields like employees’ full names, job titles, addresses, salaries, social security numbers, among other fields. 

Maintain accurate data on leads across go-to-market tools

As your sales reps engage leads, they might come across some that aren’t ready for your solution. On the flip side, there are several leads that, unbeknownst to sales, are ready for a serious conversation. 

To help you nurture leads that aren’t yet ready to buy and surface leads that are, you can integrate your CRM (e.g. Salesforce) with your sales engagement platform (e.g. Outreach) and sync specific fields, like activities and status. 

You can then build in-app automations based on how the data changes in each system. 

For instance, if a rep changes a lead’s status in your CRM to something that denotes that they’re not ready to purchase, the change is recorded automatically for the corresponding lead in the sales engagement platform; this platform also immediately adds the lead to the appropriate nurture sequence. 

Related: API polling examples

Benefits of two-way API integration

Here are just a few benefits of implementing bidirectional API integrations:

Improves team collaboration

By allowing employees to access the same set of data within their own respective systems, they’re more likely to be aligned on specific activities they need to perform, whether that’s nurturing leads, onboarding employees, managing incidents, etc.

Mitigates human errors

As employees enter in data manually, they’ll naturally make mistakes—some of which can be extremely costly. For instance, someone in HR might accidentally input the wrong salary information on an employee in your payroll system, leading that employee to receive more (or less) money than they should.

Since two-way API integrations automatically add and update data across systems, your employees can, by and large, avoid reentering data and creating issues like the one described above.

Enhances the employee experience

Syncing data across applications automatically prevents employees from having to perform data entry or hop between systems just to find accurate data.

This saves employees time and allows them to focus on more important and interesting work, which ultimately increases their productivity and level of satisfaction.

Related: Benefits of cloud integration

Uplevels the client experience

Assuming you’re looking to build product integrations, two-way integrations can also benefit your clients.

They’ll be able to automatically access accurate data in your application and in the applications it’s connected to—leading them to avoid both keying in data manually and moving between your platform and others to search for information.

Implement any two-way API integration with Merge

Using Merge, the leading product integration platform, you can build to a single unified API to offer a whole category of integrations to your product, whether that’s CRM, HRIS, file storage, etc.

The platform also offers maintenance support and management tooling to help you offer reliable and high-performing integrations over time. 

You can learn more about Merge by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.