Situation
Our Client, a key player in the luxury industry, was willing to better understand its customers' behaviour and preferences, across brands and geographies. Neither the top management nor the marketing team were able to have the complete customer picture, data being split in different databases, managed in silos.
The challenge was to build a solution centralizing and exposing data in a synthetic way, in order to drive business decisions and improve customer interactions. From a technical perspective, the project's complexity relied on 3 aspects:
- The heterogeneity of data sources & structure
- The need to process a large amount of data in real time to answer immediate business needs (more than 110'000 user profiles, and 3,8 Mio transactions stored)
- The security requirements, given the high sensitivity of client data
Approach
OWT provided support using a 3-step approach:
Selecting the front-end & back-end technologies and proposing an architecture for the solution
Refining the solution's functionalities and design
Building, testing and launching a first version of the solution
The technology stack behind the solution was elaborated to provide scalability and reliability. It is composed of state-of-the-art libraries and frameworks such as AngularJS, Slick and Akka, leveraging most of the modern features offered by the Scala programming language.
A high level view of the architecture is illustrated below, representing the three pillars of the application, namely, the extraction, consolidation and presentation of customer data.
For the extraction, agents were developed to retrieve data and push it through a secure channel to the central database hosted in Amazon's cloud. Consolidation workers transform, aggregate, and store data in a clean and homogeneous database, making the information available to the front-end through APIs.
The front-end was designed by our UX specialists, applying user-centric design best practices. This resulted in a simple, efficient and responsive interface, tailored to users' needs, that highlights key customer information according to the user and context.
In 5 months, our Client made a step forward in its digital transformation, tackling its data management issues. With this project, OWT provided:
A user-friendly interface, offering a consolidated view of its customers' behaviour and preferences, across brands and geographies
A powerful up-selling & cross-selling tool supporting business decisions & customers' interactions
A building block to develop further digital solutions
OWT provided a clear action plan to conduct the project's next step: integrate new entities and activities to the current solution to boost the database's potentialities.
