July 10, 2023

Customer Data Management

Unleashing Order in a Chaotic World

In the digital age, customer data is as ubiquitous as cat videos on the internet. Our client had abundant it and was scattered across siloed environments. Customer data was overly distributed, while their legacy database was about as flexible as a yoga newbie.

Client Overview

Our client, a major EU commerce business with a large chain of drugstores and an online platform, operates in a world where the speed of data handling determines whether you’re leading the pack or eating dust. They were not just aiming for a customer data overhaul but also required a system that would enable customers and customer support to update customer information seamlessly.

Challenge

To overcome their challenges, the client sought our expertise to:

Streamline the distributed customer view
Modify and integrate their legacy customer database with new systems
Tackle the distributed ownership issue that was affecting the customer experience
Enable updates to customer information by the customers themselves and customer support

Solution

Leveraging MuleSoft as an integration layer, we wove together a tapestry of tech tools. Our arsenal included Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Salesforce CRM for bidirectional customer data updates, Databricks for data lake systems, Salesforce Marketing Cloud for campaign-based marketing emails, and Salesforce OCAPI for customer synchronization. We synchronized data with a third-party loyalty program and order management system to keep track of updates to customer information, such as personal and shipping details.

Initially, we used Salesforce CRM’s “Subscriber Channel Listener” to consume events. But due to volume requirements and CRM’s daily message quota, we shifted to Azure Event Hubs. We allowed the CRM team to authenticate against the event hub with an OAuth 2.0 token, which was followed by a post-call for pushing messages to the event hub. In MuleSoft API, we connected to the hub via Apache Kafka batch listener to process large data batches. We also established comprehensive asynchronous reprocessing with alerting capabilities to ensure data synchronization during system unavailability. Our team utilized Azure data analytics to assist our technical team in analyzing logs. This platform enabled us to conveniently track the flow of events across our APIs using KQL’s native query language.

Results

The transformation of our client’s customer data management was profound:

The implementation of a cloud-based central customer management system
Synchronization of data across all third-party systems
Enhanced data security through efficient data flow management
An API-led driven architecture for the integration layer, aside from that also encompassing asynchronous technologies like queues, topics, and event hubs
High-load customer updates enabled without hiccups
Near real-time customer synchronization across various systems
Over 2 mill customers were loaded and started to be centrally maintained in a single system

Apart from the successful implementation of this project, we are constantly working on other key areas for our client. These include integrations with Oracle-based company systems; upon building the order management system integration from the ground up, we continue adding new features into that landscape; and revving up the data flow from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to the client’s mobile app to create the ability for customer to use their mobile phone for product search, ordering, and personal info updates.

In conclusion, modern customer data management is like conducting an orchestra. You need a centralized system to keep every player in tune. As we continue on this roller coaster of a journey with our client, we can’t wait to see what thrilling loop is next!