Use Case

How MuleSoft enables 360° customer insight and unlocks digital transformation

Many organizations are making the shift from being a transaction-centric organization to becoming a customer-centric organization. In today’s competitive landscape this is often a necessity to keep exceeding customer expectations. Nextview recently has helped a Dutch retail organization make this transformation, where Salesforce, as CRM platform, and MuleSoft, as integration platform, played a pivotal role. 

Optimizing the customer experience by integrating the end-to-end customer journey

To keep exceeding customer expectations it is essential to get a full picture of the customer throughout the entire customer lifecycle. The customer lifecycle moves from acquisition to advocacy. At different stages customer information is captured in different web, Commerce, CRM and ERP applications. Providing a 360° customer view means assembling the different customer identities into one unique customer.

In addition, many end-to-end business processes span different systems. To ensure an optimal customer experience these systems need to work together seamlessly. For example, when a customer reaches out with a complaint, the customer service agent agrees to a solution and registers this in Salesforce. To deliver the solution promptly, a service order needs to be created in SAP ERP to start the logistic and financial fulfilment processes. Hence in this case there needs to be a smooth integration of Salesforce with SAP ERP.

Seamless integration

The first step in this journey is establishing the unique customer, to be able to accompany it throughout the customer lifecycle. Across applications we have introduced a global customer ID to identify each unique customer. This has allowed us to link the identities across each system to this global ID.

Based on our design-led approach, we have worked closely with the end users in Service, Sales and Marketing to co-create the end-to-end processes, as well as to identify exactly what information around customers is required for the optimal customer journey.

By enabling the personalized and integrated sales, service and marketing processes we can accompany the customer in every step they take. By using all capabilities of MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform we have been able to quickly deliver a set of reusable APIs which perfectly connect the systems. Think of APIs that provide real time information around customer orders, deliveries, payments etc. or an API that can collect leads from any channel and ensures these leads can be used directly in the sales & marketing processes.

Results

Lower costs & flexibility

1. By introducing a solid API integration strategy based on MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform we have directly created a positive impact for the customer’s CRM business case by increasing efficiency, increasing revenue and higher NPS and eNPS results.
2. Moreover, by applying MuleSoft’s API Led Connectivity framework we have been able to contribute to lowering costs.  By minimizing the need for custom code, by lowering the overall complexity through data virtualization and of course by implementing APIs with a high level of reusability. This also allows the organization to innovate much faster. Right now this retailer is able to introduce new lead forms integrated into CRM and new up-sell / cross-sell journeys within hours. This is just one example.