Customer-Centric Notification Experience

Problem

For an enterprise with more than 12 million customers, it is important to have a centralised notifications platform (for email, sms and push) that is scalable, resilient and cost-effective.

We were set out to solve a challenge of notifications experience which felt like they were coming from different brands, not a unified voice that represented our company.

There are many notifications platform in the market - Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Marketo - are a few big ones used by our company. While they all provide amazing notifications experience, they are very expensive and often needs expertise in the area to deliver notifications to customers.

Solution

APIs

As per company strategy, we wanted to build a plug and play platform which is easy for other platforms to integrate.

The platform is pretty much RESTful API which was built on microservices managing business rules for notification delivery channels and defined delivery hours.

We used company provided services to reduce the operational cost and effort

• Hosted on AWS tenancy managed by company 🚀
• Email and SMS gateway - As a telco, we already have email and sms gateway 😃
• Notifications content is managed in Adobe Experience Manager (An enterprise content management solution) 📝

Business rules (Configuration)

Customers don’t think about channels when they are shopping your brand. In fact, you could say customers are channel agnostic. And that is a problem, because many brands’ interactions with customers are still driven by some form of channel approach – multi-channel, cross-channel, even omni-channel. But to truly meet customer expectations, we need to ditch the word channel to create a new shared vocabulary focused on journeys – customer-centric journeys.

We should not bombard customers with the notifications whenever and to whatever contact details. The platform is integrated with data warehouse which hosts customers contact details and preferences (launching soon).

We built a user interface where a business user can configure business rules and manage testing and production activation workflow.

Content management

As a notifications team, we manage content for hundreds of notifications. So we built a solution that is easy to use, manage and upgrade whenever there are changes to company's design strategy (and that happens very frequently).

While we build fully functional solution in Adobe Experience Manager, we started off with a custom build email workflow. Here is a snippet of it, hoping it might help others trying to solve the same challenge. This workflow enabled us to build an efficient content management solution for the content producers.

To take the content management ease of use approach to the next level, we are building editable emails in AEM for business users.

The notifications are personalised using Freemarker template engine