CAP enhances Software as a Service – Data Quality

This white paper is one of a series, outlining how CAP is being used to enhance a Software as a Service application.

Keywords:

Cloud, SaaS, Data, CDN

The context:

A large retailer is outsourcing their e-commerce application to a third-party provider. This relationship has existed for a long time, however the retailer grew increasingly frustrated with the cost and time involved in enacting any changes to the user experience and the lack of certain features. Adding to the sense of frustration was the fact that any requests were completely at the mercy of the third party provider.

The solution:

CAP was installed in the Amazon cloud between the end users and the third-party provider to help overcome some of these problems. By taking advantage of the CAP Agent’s built in adaptive static content caching and ability to act inline in real time with minimum performance impact, the retailer resumed control of their brand and reputation.

Deployment diagram:

Why CAP:

No other product on the market offers a CDN-like capability that also involves enhancing and enriching content on the fly on a massive scale as well as addressing urgent security shortcomings. The retailer needs this capability to have some measure of control over third party software they are otherwise unable to change.

The story:

The retailer was suffering significant operational support expense and customer care impact to run a team of at least twelve FTE to remediate problems resulting from poor data quality capture from their online web application. Free-format-text input fields for address shipping and billing details in particular were problematic for non-delivery of high risk goods, incorrect payment validation, and internal risk mitigation delivery checks, and shopping cart abandonments.

The retailer knew third party solutions existed to solve the problem and they had completed some off-line tests to confirm that Experian’s QAS address validation service would solve their data challenges, however their SaaS platform provider was unable to facilitate the change in an acceptable timeframe, and their quoted costs didn’t validate the business case to implement the change despite the continued damage to customer experience and profitability.

Using CAP, a plan was quickly hatched to resolve the issue:

When a customer registers as a first-time buyer, CAP takes control of the registration process and inserted a new function (or field) in the existing web page to allow a customer to lookup or find their billing and shipping address. The QAS interface was made available in the CAP rule library to perform the address search and select function which in turn pre-populated the previously free-formatted address input fields, providing improved data capture to be passed to the subsequent payment checkout, and confirmation pages.

Similarly, existing customers would be prompted by CAP for the same billing and shipping address validation function, allowing them to update previously stored poor quality address data.

Example modification:

The limitations:

This approach did involve a change in the online customer experience, and the retailer allowed the customer to still overwrite data returned from the address validation search if they wished to do so. Some technical knowledge of modifying existing web pages was required.

Business benefits:

This change was implemented with CAP, fully tested and deployed to production in less than five days, including the writing and performance testing of two new third-party extensions connecting to the Experian QAS data validation service. As a result, significant downturn in goods lost in transit complaints was evidence and uplift in accuracy of customer data quality. The team of operational staff was reduced in size. In addition, the retailer now had an ability to trial or use concurrently competitor third party address validation services to evaluate the effectiveness of their service provider over time without any change requests being made, or impact to their SaaS platform provider.

Rules blocks used:

QAS Search

QAS Get Address

Http Server execute (web page modification)