Thanks for your insights Chris – real practical gems here – as I’d expect!

One thing you should definitely do in advance, to establish a benchmark, is change your UI/UX, email templates etc, to include the spaces that will be populated by the software *and* establish some basic default ways to populate them (e.g. always the cheapest nails whenever you sell a hammer), that don’t require the sophistication of the software.

Personalisation projects can sometimes succeed, not because of the software, but because the implementation forces you to re-optimise your user experience. Do this first, and only then engage the software into it.

Incidentally doing all this is a good way to meet another of the author’s suggested criteria – validating that you have the resource/capacity to do the integration project – because you’ll have to do half of it up-front!