Our client is a leading automotive service provider handling huge customer data, inventory of automobiles, spares, service centers, and much more. Their customer service portal handles huge service requests and distributes the responses to respective vendor applications. To extract and process the customer data, the portal interacts with the SAP data platform.
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A Sneak Peek
Challenge
The client’s legacy customer service portal had limitations in parallelly processing the service requests and responses due to tightly coupled monolithic architecture hosted in on-premises server. Also, the SAP data layer had confined storage space demanding more efforts in remedial activities and operations.
Solution
AVASOFT proposed an application and data platform modernization solution to roll out a modern, intuitive, and hassle-free customer service portal with self-service capabilities.
Business Gains
- Unified Customer Service Portal that processes service requests & distributes responses across vendor applications without any performance bottlenecks.
- An orchestrated service portal with microapps and micro frontend architecture.
- Modern data landscape with real-time streaming solutions.
- Self-service reporting dashboards for inventory, customer, other critical business data insights.
- Integrated advanced ML models to elevate self-service capabilities and slash rudimentary service queries.
- Best-in-class DevOps practices.
Business Challenge: Tightly packed monolithic system with huge downtime, performance bottlenecks, and reluctance to new age tools
The client partnered with multiple vendors to render automotive services for their customers at the doorstep. Being the core of the business, it’s crucial to maintain their customer service portal 100% reliable and efficient.
With the business expansion and data inflation, the customer service portal faced performance bottlenecks and downtime by processing multiple service requests in parallel. This resulted in the improper & timed out responses and decline of service requests in the service portal. Also, it annoyed the end users and diminished brand loyalty to a greater extent.
The service agents were unable to track the issues as there was no proper logging system. Even if they resolve response issues, the mitigation strategy for rudimentary service queries and bugs was not automated. Instead, every bug was considered the new one, and the agents must resolve them from square one. This service lifecycle hindered the productivity of the team with redundant tasks and solution offerings.
Overall, the client was striving to unify customer service operations in a service portal with efficient performance and intuitive user experience.
To make it crisp, the major technical gaps in their customer service portal were:
- Focusing on operations & technology than the business with a hard-to-manage monolithic system,
- Lack of automation in the areas of rudimentary mitigation strategies or service queries,
- Managing a legacy on-premises server with confined storage space,
- Facing performance bottlenecks that is proportional to customer inflation,
- Wrong-headed user flow, navigation, and dull customer service portal,
- Improper logging system,
- Reluctance to adopt current trends, AI, and ML models.
The client decided to shift their legacy customer service portal and SAP data platform to a modular and sustainable architecture that could ease their operations, support advanced analytical tools, and much more!
Business Solution: Application & Data Platform Modernization
App Modernization
Our solution architects delved in and inspected their existing customer service portal architecture. We recommended modernizing their Java based monolithic architecture to modular, sustainable microservices & micro frontend architecture using .NET Core and Angular. We proposed the application modernization solution that encompasses the refactoring of their monolithic architecture and rehosting of on-premises infrastructure into Azure platform as per their business needs & organizational model.
The initial goal was to refactor each application module and business functionality as a microapp & microservice in line with the proposed modular architecture. With reusability and inter-process communication in mind, we carefully grouped microservices for efficient application performance. Also, we built a standalone microservice to monitor, notify and log the service requests and responses of the customer service portal.
On top of these implementations, we built custom API gateways to handle parallel service requests and responses without any performance bottlenecks. As the responses are distributed to multiple vendors, we implemented an automated orchestration workflow to validate schema for incoming and outgoing messages depending on specific vendors. As a result of this app modernization, their customer service portal was shifted to modular, sustainable architecture with hassle-free maintenance, scalability, intuitive user experience, adaptability to analytical processing tools, and best-in-class DevOps culture.
Business gains
- 100% application availability with optimized disaster recovery mechanisms
- 65% reduction in maintenance & operations cost
- 85% smoother rollout with automated release lifecycle.
- 1-day Idea-to-feature timeframes. Reduced from months to days.
- Huge savings on infrastructure & licensing costs
- Enhanced user experience, performance & scalability
- User-Centric & Persona-specific Design with intuitive and creative design thinking principles.
- Flexible & orchestrated architecture with utilities to manage customer requests & responses efficiently and log the application.
Data Platform Modernization
As the client was aspiring to roll out a modern customer service portal that is efficient and reliable, we proposed the data platform modernization too! The client’s legacy customer service portal had on-premises SAP layers for data storage and visualization.
The client’s existing data architecture had limitations and required huge maintenance efforts. They were looking for a modern data landscape with real-time streaming solutions. Our data architects collaborated with the client to engineer the data platform modernization strategy. Based on their business requirements, we curated a cloud data strategy and rehosted their SAP data layer to Azure data platform.
Upon rehosting their legacy data layer to Azure data platform, we integrated Power BI for self-service reporting dashboards of inventory, customer, and other critical business data insights. As a value add-on, we integrated advanced ML models to elevate self-service capabilities and slash rudimentary service queries in the service portal.
On the whole, the customer service portal had an efficient performance with customer-360 data insights in an intuitive & self-service custom dashboard.
Business gains
- Millions of dollars savings by shifting to the modern data landscape
- 10% reduction in workforce (Service Agents)
- Reduced service tickets from 1500+ to 200+
- 1000+ service agents leveraging a real-time reporting dashboard.
- 100% data availability
- Unified layer that manages customer, services, inventory, and analytics data
Hear from our clients
“We were looking for the right technology partner who can shift our legacy customer service portal to modular & highly performing modern landscape. Our organization was thriving for a cutting-edge solution with AI, ML, and analytics to revive brand loyalty & customer satisfaction. AVASOFT did it incredibly at a pace that was flexible & convenient for us!”
– Karl Walters, Senior Manager of Infrastructure & Operational Excellence at leading automotive service provider.
