Notify: Customer notifications platform
date
Sep 15, 2020
slug
notify-customer-notifications
status
Published
tags
Product
Content
summary
Customer-centric and scalable notifications platform for Telstra - delivering a million notifications a day. Keeping customers up to date with their products and services.
type
Post
A Scalable, Cost-Effective Solution for 12 Million+ Customers!
At Notify (Telstra), we faced a thrilling challenge: creating a centralised notifications platform (email, SMS, push) for over 12 million customers that's not only scalable and resilient but also cost-effective. Our goal? To ensure a unified brand voice across all customer interactions, a stark contrast to the fragmented experience often associated with using multiple, expensive enterprise solutions like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe, and Marketo. These platforms, while powerful, demand significant expertise and hefty price tags.
Our Winning Strategy: A Powerful, Plug-and-Play Platform
Our solution leverages a robust, plug-and-play architecture built on microservices and RESTful APIs. This design allows seamless integration with other platforms, ensuring a smooth and efficient notification delivery process. We've strategically utilised existing company resources to minimise operational costs and effort:
- AWS Hosting: We harnessed the power of AWS, leveraging company-managed tenancy for optimal performance and cost efficiency. 🚀
- Internal Gateways: As a telecommunications company, we smartly utilised our existing email and SMS gateways, eliminating the need for external providers and significantly reducing expenses. 😃
- Adobe Experience Manager (AEM): For content management, we integrated with AEM, a robust enterprise content management solution, providing a centralised hub for all notification content. 📝
Beyond Channels: Customer Journeys Take Center Stage
We understand that customers don't think in terms of channels; they experience journeys. Therefore, our platform goes beyond simple channel-based notifications. We've integrated with a data warehouse to personalise notifications based on individual customer preferences and contact details. This ensures that customers receive relevant messages at the right time and through their preferred method.
Business Rules Engine: Empowering Business Users
To streamline the notification process, we've developed a user-friendly interface that allows business users to configure business rules, manage testing, and control production activation workflows. This empowers non-technical users to manage and optimise notification campaigns efficiently.
Content Management: Efficiency and Scalability
Managing content for hundreds of notifications requires a sophisticated solution. We initially built a custom email workflow (see details here) to establish a foundation for efficient content management. This workflow served as a stepping stone to our current AEM-based solution, which allows for easy content updates and adaptation to evolving company design strategies. We're further enhancing this by enabling business users to directly edit emails within AEM.
Personalisation is key, and we achieve this through the powerful FreeMarker template engine. This ensures that every notification is tailored to the individual recipient.
In conclusion, Notify's notification platform is a testament to efficient design, strategic resource utilisation, and a customer-centric approach. We've not only solved a complex challenge but also created a scalable and cost-effective solution that empowers our business users and enhances the customer experience.