Details and description

The client used a Salesforce implementation for CRM details and extensive customer processes. There was an extensive application landscape for the various business tasks and functions. In which customer data stored in Salesforce was required for several processes and systems.

What needed to be done

There was a two-fold requirement. For smaller customers the client wished to further automate the enrollment, acceptance process, as well as onboarding. By offering a restricted web-portal where aspiring customers could publish their details in advance, the system would execute basic checks, and once passed the pre-vetted prospect could be further processed by an account manager. Allowing the portal as a medium which contained the relevant steps and allowed for the prospect to submit required documents and specific information. While the respective prospect onboarding and vetting processes were exclusively hosted in Salesforce. The Salesforce environment needed to be completely decoupled from users and the web world for security reasons.

In addition to the prospect approval and onboarding process. The Salesforce implementation, being the master customer data store. Occasionally needed enrichment from third party sources, following certain legal requirements. The external vendor system utilized an extensive XML/SOAP interface. With a standard published interface (WSDL) that could not be parsed by the Salesforce XML utilities. An additional challenge was posed by certain boundary conditions where the client after initial full enrichment was only interested in changes in customer data, whereby each change required human evaluation, possibly leading to further actions. The vendor was not able to supply delta datasets hence the changes had to be identified, categorized, prioritized and stored for later evaluation by SME’s.

The solution(s)

The solutions provided allowed for remote applications to be filled out by prospects while simultaneously in the backend relevant Salesforce processes would be triggered to evaluate specific data points. The web intermediary (forms and document upload) were realized with NodeJS and Express. NodeJS allowed for separate storage of documents where they could be scanned etc). Integration was provided through a secure webservice running on the force.com platform. To make sure data could be enriched periodically, where mutations would be individually identifiable and available for further checking we implemented an XML interface between the Salesforce platform and the service provider.

The gains

Customer service agents saved a significant amount of time at every step of the vetting and onboarding process. Furthermore data enrichment took place in the background. Allowing for notification whenever relevant changes had occurred at the organizational- or legal level with clients.