OK, so we’ve looked at building aspects of a Customer 360 solution in previous posts.

We looked at an overview of what’s involved in part 1, and since you’re reading this, I’m assuming that the threat of having to think didn’t scare you off.

Next we looked at the integration necessary for extracting the data from various source systems, transforming it into a single customer view, and the loading it into a Couchbase bucket in part 2.

Finally, we looked at how we could use Couchbase Mobile to enable your Account Executives to have access to their customer’s information on their phone, even when out of cell service range in part 3.

Now, let’s turn our attention to doing something different with your customer data.

Specifically, we’re going to look at enabling the data nerds in your organization to be able to extract information from your customer data in various ways.

After all, why go to the bother of consolidating your customer data into one place if no one’s going to look at it?

Gathering Information

So, let’s say your Account Executive had a productive meeting with a client on the 7th green.

And let’s say that he entered some notes about the meeting in his mobile Customer 360 application.

And those notes said something along the lines of…

“If widget X came in red, he would but ten times as many as he currently does.”

If you had an microservice running against the Couchbase Sync Gateway changes feed, it could pick up this update when the Account Executive got to where he had connectivity again, and the app on his phone could sync his update to the Customer 360 bucket on your Couchbase cluster, notice that it was feedback about Widget X, and could automatically fire off a notice to the Product Manager in charge of Widget X…

Hmm…

How would this work?

The thing is, our Sync Gateway has a data feed that we refer to as the “changes” feed.

It consists of the list of document changes that have occurred since the last update you’ve read from it.

Inserts, updates, deletes, it’s all included.

Assuming you’ve got permission to see the changes, that is.

And you can filter it by channel, if you need.

So you can easily set up a microservice that is hooked into this feed, and is looking at the updates that it’s interested in…

Ignoring what it doesn’t care for…

And so our Widget X Product Manager finds herself receiving these random notifications about color suggestions…

Looking For More

OK, so now our Product Manager now has this request from one customer for Widget X in a specific color.

So, she starts thinking…

Always a bad sign…

And wondering…

How many other customers have requests about colors for Widget X?

Hmm, if only there were some way…

Oh, I got it! She can use our Full-Text Search functionality to look around!

See, the problem is that there’s no telling which properties these requests may be in.

After all, there’s multiple different data sources it may be hidden in.

Was the request made to an Account Executive, a support person, a C-level executive at a conference…

It could be anywhere, in any number of data elements.

Luckily for her, our Full Text Search can look in all of them, all at once.

So, she can pull up a search screen and enter “Widget X color”…

Or if she’s across the pond in Jolly Ole’ England, “Widget X colour”…

(If only they knew how to spell!)

And next thing she knows…

Data!

All sorts of data…

The problem is it’s like searching for something on Amazon…

Or Google…

All sorts of individual entries to choose from…

With the key words she searched on highlighted in a short sample of the text in which it was found…

Ugh, too much.

If only there was some way to take this data…

And feed it into some sort of analytics query…

Hmm…

Oh, wait…

That’s right!

She’s using the Couchbase Full-Text Search…

That means…

Data! More Data!

She can go all Data Nerd!

(OK, so I’m jumping slightly ahead in time, to when our next release, 6.5, is available, which it will be before you know it!)

(After all, it’s right around the corner…)

(The release data, that is.)

(It’s not like it’s lurking around a corner, like a mugger in a dark alley…)

(Mugged by data! Sounds like a job for Data Nerd!)

(Marvel Comics, are you listening?)

Where was I?

Oh yeah, Data Nerd!

She can take the results of her FTS search (Full-Text Search, we like to talk in acronyms. It makes us sound like we have secret knowledge…) and feed it into a N1QL query (our version of SQL, basically SQL for JSON documents, but then you already knew that, or else you wouldn’t be reading the Couchbase Blog…).

It’ll look something like…

And then she can leverage our Analytics service to pull up the data in something she can actually use.

Like a spreadsheet…

Or any of many different data analysis tools…

Producing graphs, charts, black magic imagery…

Wait…

Um…

Maybe not that last one…

No black magic involved anywhere.

Just data.

So, data magic imagery…

And she can take that data magic imagery into the next product planning meeting and make her case…

As to why they need to come out with a red Widget X.

After all, there’s all these customers begging for it.

And she has the numbers to back up that statement.

Time to make that customer put his money where his mouth is…

After all, she is Data Nerd!

(I’m telling you Marvel, we’ve got a hit here…)

So, Couchbase

As I stated outright in my last post, I like to keep things simple.

I mean, life is complicated enough as is…

Why would I want to add to that?

So, by leveraging Couchbase, I can build a Customer 360 solution that allows me to mix and match my methods of digging through data, combining Full-Text Search with N1QL and Analytics in ways that are to a data nerd like spinach is to Popeye.

See, by keeping everything in the same toolkit, we can do that.

Sure, you could go elsewhere for your Full-Text Search functionality…

And somewhere else for your analytics data lake…

And feed both of them from a NoSQL database with some awkward query bolt-on…

But good luck getting them to work together…

Feeding the results from one into the other as part of the same search.

Probably would take hours to get it to work.

I’d rather spend my time soaring through my data, cape flapping in the aggregates…

Just call me…

Data Nerd!

(Come on Marvel, call me!)

After all…

Couchbase!

Enabling data nerds everywhere…

Author

Posted by Davis Chapman

Davis Chapman calls himself a Solution Architect, claims to be employed by Couchbase, and is supposedly part of our Professional Services team. He says that he’s been in the industry for decades, and has been involved in application development for most of that time. Hmm, we'll have to check on that...

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