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A guide to webhook events (4 examples)
In many cases, certain stakeholders will need to access specific data in, or near, real-time.
This can be sales reps who need to find and follow-up with warm leads; engineers who need to identify, work on, and resolve critical product issues; customer success teams that need to pinpoint and engage clients that have breached the terms of their contracts—and so on.
To help facilitate seamless and fast alerts, you can use webhook events.
We’ll break down how, exactly, webhook events can be used in different scenarios, but let’s start by defining the term.
What is a webhook event?
It’s a specific, predefined trigger in an application that leads a webhook to send a payload to a specified URL. Given all the scenarios that warrant real-time data syncs, webhook events can vary widely.
Related: How API sandboxes work
Examples of webhook events
To help bring our definition to life, let’s walk through a few webhook events for internal and customer-facing integration scenarios.
Create new leads in your CRM once they reach a certain lead score in your marketing automation tool
As soon as a lead is ready for a conversation with sales, they should be routed to the appropriate rep in your CRM as quickly as possible. That way, your sales rep can engage the lead while your product is top of mind for them.
To help facilitate this, you register a webhook in your marketing automation tool that listens for prospects’ lead scores. Once the lead score crosses a certain threshold (this is your webhook event), the lead gets added to your CRM along with associated fields, empowering the rep to not only respond quickly but also thoughtfully.
Related: Common ways to use webhooks
Create tickets in your engineering team’s ticketing tool once an issue is escalated by customer support
Your customer support team can’t, unfortunately, tackle every issue on their own. Whenever they find themselves in this position, they’ll likely need to quickly and easily escalate the ticket to their colleagues in engineering so that the latter can begin tackling it with little delay.
To tackle this scenario effectively, you can register a webhook in your customer support team’s ticketing tool that listens for tickets marked as urgent (this is your webhook event). Any time this occurs, the corresponding ticket gets added to your engineering team’s ticketing tool, along with the context they need to understand and resolve the issue.
Notify clients’ engineering teams when your product identifies security vulnerabilities
Let’s imagine you offer a product that scans clients’ code bases to identify a range of security issues.
To help your clients get notified of urgent issues quickly, they can register a webhook in your product that listens for critical issues (this is your webhook event). Whenever this event occurs for a client, a ticket can automatically get created in their ticketing tool, with pertinent details populated so that their team can address it quickly.
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Related: How to set up and use webhooks
Sync clients’ documents in real-time with your product so that information in your product stays up-to-date
Say you provide a platform that allows employees to search for and find a wide range of information on their company (i.e. an employee intranet).
To ensure your product’s information stays accurate and, therefore, useful at any given point in time, you can allow clients to register a webhook in their file storage tool that listens for any changes in their documents (this is your webhook event). Any time this event takes place, your product can—in real-time—make the associated change, whether that’s adding, modifying, or deleting a file.
Build real-time syncs between your product and clients’ applications through Merge
Merge, a single API that lets you add hundreds of integrations to your product, supports 3rd-party webhooks to help your product receive data payloads in real-time. And, in the event that a 3rd-party platform doesn’t support webhooks, you can use Merge’s.
You can learn more about using webhooks with Merge by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.
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