Enter Centric: A Custom Solution to Better Manage Customer Preference Data
Centric Consulting’s Seattle office partnered with the client to develop a custom solution in just 12 weeks. Doing so allowed the client to avoid the legal ramifications inaction would have caused. It also led to improved customer experience and lower overall operating costs.
“Because of the sheer number of records, we knew right away that an out-of-the-box solution wasn’t going to work,” explains our Sr. Architect Dave Melendez, who oversaw the project. “Instead, we had to build a custom solution that would honor customer preferences quickly, and be capable of moving massive amounts of data.”
The main project priorities were speed to delivery, lowering the latency of data updates and building a scalable architecture. We took the lead, orchestrating the collaboration of worldwide stakeholder teams with varying roles across the business, including external vendors, marketing and engineering groups.
Scaling Using Azure
In this case, we knew going in that the chosen platform would have a dramatic impact on the success of our client to mitigate risk. The platform had to keep up with demand in managing new client records, while managing changes fast enough to meet internal and external compliance metrics.
To meet these challenges, we architected a highly scalable system using Azure, which was able to handle the migration of 4.5 billion users, ensure legal compliance and maintain or improve client experience.
As a first phase, we successfully designed and deployed a system that could handle the load while maintaining 99.9 percent uptime and meeting a best-in-class sub-second response time requirement using Azure.
“Even in its infancy,” explains Melendez, “our platform needed to accommodate billions of user records and billions of requests each day.” Despite the highly technical requirements, the initial migration of all 4.5 billion customer records was completed in 2.5 days after implementation.
With a key milestone complete, the team went to work on hard-hitting improvements to the system.
From Good Enough To Unmatched
With the initial infrastructure build complete, we provided engineering talent and project oversight to deliver a series of significant improvements. We began by engineering a management portal to provide insight into customer contact preferences for newsletters and improve the welcome email delivery processes.
In improving the data management in these areas, including the integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the delivery time of welcome emails dropped dramatically from 24 hours to a just few minutes. This markedly improved customer experience after an initial purchase, resulting in an improvement in product engagement early in the customer engagement cycle.
“Finally, we had to ensure the business, the engineering teams and outside vendors were all playing from the same sheet of music,” notes Travis Hall, Lead Program Manager for the project. In order to accomplish this, we oversaw the product rollout to Marketing, Compliance, Engineering and vendor teams with world class multi-group, multi-vendor and multi-national project management.
From project inception to project completion, we were able to mitigate our client’s risk, improve customer experience and reduce costs in only 12 weeks.
As a result of this engagement, our client is able to send emails to users in multiple countries and meet various international contact laws and LCID requirements without the risk of serious legal ramifications.
The Results: A Bright Future with a System that Handles Millions of New Users Per Day
Our client is now able to handle millions of new users per day, with the ability to migrate more than 350 million users per day if needed.
The system we implemented became the foundation for the client’s current Contact Management System that is now used to track customer contact preferences across the company.
With our help, our client was able to migrate their customer data, honor customer preferences and achieve legal compliance.
