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Challenge: Legacy app slowed releases and limited automation
Sendoso has gifting down to a science. Marketing, sales, and customer teams use Sendoso to send the perfect gift at the right time, whether it’s to close a deal, create a memorable experience, or strengthen a relationship. Because the platform integrates with HubSpot, Sendoso customers never have to leave their CRM to add a gift to their flow. They can choose the right gift, write a personalized message, and click to send it off—all from HubSpot.
But initially, maintaining that seamless experience for Sendoso customers was a time-intensive process for the engineering team. Multiple manual steps extended debugging timelines and led to a release cycle of once a week. Aiming to reduce the manual effort and adopt a more modern development environment, the team looked for ways to evolve their HubSpot integration.
Solution: Accelerating development and simplifying migration
With HubSpot CLI and UI extensions, Sendoso sped up their development lifecycle significantly—from weekly releases to several times every day. “Instead of setting up multiple different environments of local development, staging, and production, HubSpot CLI lets us run our local code changes against the production environment, showing how customers would experience the proposed changes,” says Cheema, Sendoso Software Engineer II. Now that engineers can replicate and resolve customer issues locally within minutes, debugging is also faster.
HubSpot CLI also helps the Sendoso team improve collaboration by instantly showcasing potential UI changes. “Sometimes we iterate on a feature multiple times before actually releasing it to production,” says Cheema. “HubSpot CLI lets us develop something then just share our screen to show product managers how it will look for customers.”
Beyond speeding up day-to-day development, HubSpot CLI simplified the migration from Sendoso’s legacy HubSpot app. The built-in migration command let the team merge the old integration and new UI extensions into a single project with almost no manual effort. The process automatically archived their legacy code and recreated the full app environment in a new project framework. “It was super helpful to essentially migrate our legacy app with just one command,” says Cheema. “We didn’t need to maintain two separate systems and if we want to go back and look at our old code, it’s still there.”
Building agents in days to automate workflows
By eliminating hours of work spent on maintaining pipelines, Cheema’s team can focus on building new functionality inside HubSpot, like AI and agents. Sendoso was one of the first companies to join HubSpot’s agent beta program. Using HubSpot’s Breeze Agent platform, the Sendoso team focused on automating workflows to save their customers’ time.They created tools for agents to replace many manual steps, including:
- Recommending gifts based on HubSpot contact data
- Shortlisting options according to company or location
- Personalizing notecards
- Sending gifts
HubSpot’s agent infrastructure orchestrates the entire workflow from end to end. “We built multiple tools that an agent needs to orchestrate our gifting workflows,” says Cheema. “When everything about AI is changing at such a high pace, it’s crucial for us to leverage agent infrastructures built by the platforms where our customers are. That lets us evolve as the big AI providers evolve, without disruption to our customers’ experiences.”
The process for developing a new tool for an agent took roughly three days, which is substantially less than the six months it would have taken to build an agent from scratch. According to Cheema, HubSpot’s schema templates and developer documentation accelerated the process. “When you're working with agents, you need to know the exact format of their response types, or the agent is going to fail,” he says. “HubSpot has it very well documented in their documentation now. They provide boilerplate, or templates for these agents, and we just replace the endpoints, inputs, and outputs to create a tool that an agent can start using.”
The result is a smarter, more efficient gifting experience for Sendoso customers, which took a lot less time to launch. “All of that headache of creating agents is no longer on the developer if they’re using the developer platform to put their tool out,” says Cheema. “It’s on HubSpot and they’re handling it super well.”
Securing user mapping for license-based automation
Because Sendoso operates as a license-based platform, every automation must be tied to a specific user for authentication and compliance. Early in the agent development process, this posed a major challenge. HubSpot’s early agents were user-agnostic, meaning Sendoso couldn’t initially tell which HubSpot user had triggered an action.
As a temporary solution, Sendoso built a workaround to identify the initiating user behind each agent-triggered request. Working closely with HubSpot’s Developer Relations team, they figured out a permanent fix. “When we explained the issue to the HubSpot Developer Relations team, they instantly provided us with the external user ID we needed to identify the user inside HubSpot,” says Cheema. “Then we can translate it on our end.” This allowed Sendoso to securely map each automation back to the correct user, ensuring that every send was properly attributed and aligned with Sendoso’s licensing model.
Results: 2X faster releases and a 30% boost in engagement
Since adopting HubSpot’s Developer Platform, Sendoso’s engineering team has significantly reduced the time it takes to develop, test, and release updates to the HubSpot tools and workflows. “Our development lifecycle for HubSpot tooling is at least twice as fast now,” says Cheema. “Previously, we had to commit code changes to a repo, then deploy it. Today, it’s lightning fast.”
In addition, by using HubSpot’s Breeze Agent tools, Sendoso has reduced the number of manual clicks needed to execute a send. As a result, customers are sending gifts up to 40 percent faster and Sendoso has seen a 30 percent month-over-month increase in gift sends within Hubspot since releasing its agents. These sends require significant system resources, with each one involving contact and lead updates, gift tracking, and synchronization with HubSpot’s timelines. In a single day, Sendoso’s system processes and updates 1,500 HubSpot contacts.
HubSpot’s developer tools are designed to enable seamless integration between third-party applications and HubSpot’s CRM ecosystem. HubSpot provides developers with a comprehensive suite of tools and APIs that simplify the integration process while maintaining enterprise-grade security and performance. To learn more about building on HubSpot:
- Try the new HubSpot Developer Platform
- Learn more about the Developer Platform
- Visit the HubSpot App Marketplace
- Visit the HubSpot Developer Portal
- Join the HubSpot Developer Community
- Explore the HubSpot Developer Documentation
- Check out sample code on GitHub