Publisher launches online checkout through order-to-cash integration

The challenge

Checkout had no access to customer data

With digital disruptors like Amazon seizing a large share of book sales, today’s publishers have stiff competition. These market pressures made a compelling case for our client to diversify into online sales.

At the time of this project, Influential’s software engineers had developed an online checkout portal for the publisher’s customers to buy magazine subscriptions. The last piece of the puzzle was to connect this online checkout, built in a Microsoft Azure cloud, to the customer data that it needed to place orders.

However, there was no in-built connectivity between the cloud-based checkout and the company’s on-premise customer relationship management (CRM) software, from AdvantageCS. For this reason, this order-to-cash integration effort required some in-depth expertise with Azure Integration Services.

Without that CRM data integration in place, the company faced the following obstacles:

• the need for sales staff to manually check and update customer data
• a high risk of inaccuracy and duplication in customer and sales data
• low customer satisfaction due to the lengthy purchase process

In light of these issues, it was clear that an order-to-cash integration solution was critical to the company’s growth.

The solution

On-premise CRM data integration with the cloud

This publisher knew of Influential’s integration work for publishers like Taylor & Francis, Hachette, and Oxford University Press. And having demonstrated our Azure expertise in building the online checkout system, our team was ideally placed to deliver the customer data integration as well.

The solution concerned a common integration challenge, namely how to connect an on-premise system to the cloud. Our decision to use Azure technology to achieve this was based on this platform’s low-code, top-security, and high-value features.

Because of the complex queries that the checkout needed to perform on the on-premises CRM, a pre-built Azure connector was not sufficient. Instead, we took the approach of developing an on-premises API that would query the customer database.

Breaking the project down into two halves, on the Azure cloud side there were:

• the online checkout portal
• an Azure Logic App
• a custom Azure connector

And on the on-premises side we had:

• an Azure on-premise data gateway
• an ASP.NET Core API
• and, of course, the AdvantageCS CRM

With all these elements in place, the online checkout system was automatically updated with accurate data from the company’s CRM. And when a customer placed an order in the checkout, the CRM automatically received that data. In this way, the order-to-cash process had become smooth and self-sufficient for both customers and the sales team.

The benefits

Growing sales with customer data integration