Salesforce Integration of a Data Quality Solution
Our partnership with the client, which is one of the top 3 credit bureaus in the World, began in 2006 and continues to this day.
In 2006, the client was looking for a way to diversify its integration portfolio, and since by then Salesforce had shown all the signs that it would have a big impact on the CRM world, we offered to integrate the client's address, email and phone validation services into Salesforce. Our client trusted us as Salesforce experts to complete the project. The integration was such a hit that it won several internal awards and was declared the most successful integration. In addition, the customer's product became one of the most highly rated data quality applications on the AppExchange.
With the development of Salesforce over the years, we have further developed and maintained the solution and from V1, which we created in 2006, now, 14 years later, we are working on V5.
The application has two components, a .NET-based backend and a Salesforce solution package. The main challenge back in 2006, which is also relevant today is to maintain both components up to date and compliant with Salesforce.
The team has to ensure that the backend stays up to date not only with ever-changing security standards and best practices, by regularly running the code through numerous security tools such as Veracode, OWASP Zap Scanner, and penetration testing, but also with Salesforce’s security requirements and innovations.
Maintaining the Salesforce solution package as a working product that is compatible with each and every Salesforce release is another challenging task. A strict organization is required, as, after the announcement of each new release, a new team must be introduced to handle the compatibility testing and maintenance. The team should review the release notes, evaluate the information in the context of the solution, its versions and components (from V1 to V5), and report if any breaking changes are expected. If so, it also has to estimate the effort for their remediation, apply the fixes and ensure a seamless implementation before the official release of Salesforce, so that there is no downtime.
Once Salesforce introduced the Lightning experience the solution had to be upgraded to be Lightning and Salesforce1 ready without deprecating the support for the Salesforce Classic UI, which made the maintenance and support of the solution more challenging.
At the same time, a separate team provides 3rd line support to end customers within the SLA, many of whom had heavily customized environments, so we had to develop custom solutions for their specific needs.
We created an integration between the client’s solution and Salesforce that allows a real-time validation of records between the two systems. All installation and configuration steps are visualized within Salesforce as a wizard, which decreased the number of escalations due to misconfiguration.
The provided solution enabled users to verify addresses, emails and phone numbers in real-time, right at the point of entry, by instantly detecting and removing incorrect or incomplete data without disrupting end-user workflow. Batch mode address cleansing corrects any inaccuracies that already exist in your database, which is ideal for cleaning list imports or running regular database audits.
Furthermore, we provide support to end customers in real-time for debugging when required. In addition, we help with workload process management, making sure that prioritized tasks are delivered on time with sufficient documentation covering all product changes.
