AO.com Builds 360-Degree Single View on MongoDB Atlas to Improve Customer Experience, Fight Fraud and Comply with the GDPR
DevOps culture and MongoDB Atlas Help Build New Platform in Less Than Six Months
LONDON, Aug. 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- In a bid to fight fraud and become GDPR compliant, online electricals retailer AO.com built a single customer view platform on MongoDB Atlas, the fully-managed database as a service offering from MongoDB, Inc. (Nasdaq: MDB), the leading modern, general purpose database platform.
Delivered in just a few months, the platform is pulling in all of AO.com's disparate data sources and data silos into one location where it can easily be accessed, managed and audited by staff or regulators. This single view of customer data has numerous business benefits such as allowing call centre staff to instantly see all previous customer interactions to then give a better, speedier service. By improving access to data, and introducing more automation, fraud resolutions are also being reduced from several days down to minutes.
The team chose MongoDB Atlas, running on AWS, and was able to go from development to production in less than six months.
"We put customers at the heart of everything we do here at AO and that excellence extends right through to how we approach development. In fact, infrastructure is the third pillar of our business model because we know that it's the foundation of any good customer experience, whether online or offline," explained Jon Vines, Software Development Team Lead at AO.com.
"The single customer view project was the obvious next stage in that infrastructure evolution but as anyone who's tried will tell you: putting a massive variety of data types and sources together in one place is really hard. Luckily MongoDB's flexible schema proved the perfect data platform that handled anything we threw at it while still allowing us to move quickly and stay focused on the end customer. The Atlas service has been absolutely rock solid."
As well as the call centre support staff and fraud teams, the group looking after the European Union's GDPR regulation rely on the platform to give a fully up to date and accurate picture of customer preferences. This helps the company comply with the regulations and ensure the privacy and security of an individual's data.
Given the platform would need to process a wide variety and high volume of data, AO was always going to go with a distributed database. Through prototyping and competitive testing, they quickly found MongoDB's document model allowed for the greatest flexibility and scale. Then on the management side, using the fully-managed MongoDB Atlas cloud service meant they didn't have to worry about database operations, monitoring or backups. Atlas automates all of those services. All of which fit with an evolving developer ethos at AO.com that means DevOps teams are responsible for building, shipping and managing the applications from start to finish.
"MongoDB Atlas has been the perfect tool to for us in a unique DevOps culture that prides itself on fast iteration, improving feedback loops and continuous improvement. The success of the single view project is really down to the combination of our team, our technology choices and an incredibly clear focus on putting customers first," concluded Jon.
Further resources:
- Read more about AO.com's development approach and its use of MongoDB Atlas in our Leaf in the Wild series
- AO.com is hiring, visit www.ao-jobs.com to find out more
- To find out more and see Jon present at MongoDB Europe, on November 8, reserve your tickets now. Use the code AO20 to get 20% off
- To get started with your own single view project, download MongoDB's 10-Step Methodology Guide
About AO.com
Online electricals retailer, AO.com was founded in 2000 by John Roberts following a £1 bet in a Bolton pub. Roberts remains an Executive Director of the company today, while former COO, Steve Caunce was appointed CEO in February 2017. Formerly known as Appliances Online, the company rebranded in 2013 to become AO.com and the current logo was born. In the same year, they aired their first TV advert and reached 1 million Facebook likes. In February 2014 the company floated on the London Stock Exchange as AO World. AO.de was launched in Germany in 2014, with AO.nl following in 2016. 2016 also saw the opening of an 84,000 square metre, purpose-built HQ located in Bergheim. AO.com stocks over 4000 products and delivers millions of electricals every year from its 740,000 sq. ft. warehouse in Crewe. AO.com's user-friendly website aims to provide helpful and impartial information on all of its products and is able to price match any retailer stocking the same products. AO.com also offers customers free and next day delivery on thousands of products, as well as installation and recycling.
About MongoDB
MongoDB is the leading modern, general purpose database platform, designed to unleash the power of software and data for developers and the applications they build. Headquartered in New York, MongoDB has more than 6,600 customers in over 100 countries. The MongoDB database platform has been downloaded over 40 million times and there have been more than a million MongoDB University registrations.
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