Building Success CRM
We built Success CRM during my tenure at TeamSupport. The company had a leading Support product (a help desk system) that held an incredible amount of data on customer behavior, but using that data to manage relationships focuses on pain points (tickets) instead of enabling a positive customer tenure. Success CRM manages customers' journeys, surfaces opportunities, and predicts future customer needs that relationship managers can act on. The product uniquely correlates interactions to revenue, an important feature that no other product could do.
Success CRM Story
Robert C. Johnson, the CEO of TeamSupport at the time, conceived the idea for the product. His industry connections confirmed that while all existing products manage client interactions well, none can tie these to revenue. Robert's pivotal requirement was to design a product offering this observability.
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I recruited the team, was focused on the product's architecture, and led R&D. The architecture was notably intricate, as we were developing the product during a period of significant disparity between it and our legacy system in terms of data schema, monolithic vs. server-less design, middleware and approach to web application development. Nevertheless, I made it my prime design goal that the architecture will enable the reuse of software components, minimize data replication, and allow events in one product to trigger actions in others, uniformly.
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Barry Tallis did legendary work defining the product features and market research; Tonya Abna innovatively designed a novel motif that paved the way for the product's intuitive UI, where graphical representations of customer data became actionable. An extraordinary team of engineers, led by Elysée ‘EZ’ Habimana, delivered on every specification. You can find out more on the unique visual aspect of this product.
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Success CRM architecture was cloud-native from its inception. At the time of design, we were already dealing with the company's legacy Support product, which was pressured daily by its growth and global demand. Building Success CRM on a pure cloud paradigm showed the value of just-in-time resource consumption. We solicited a small group of early adopters from our customer base to validate our ideas and their implementation in the product. Additional requirements from the architecture were global hosting for locality and performance, lightning-fast NLP search, security and data sovereignty (we had prospects in the US, Canada, and the EU), seamless integrations, and the future addition of a mobile application without code changes.
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The technology stack​
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Programming languages -- C#, Python, and TypeScript
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Web framework -- React Bootstrap
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Web front end -- React
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Event management -- Amazon SQS and SNS
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Database -- Amazon PostgreSQL under RDS
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Object storage -- Amazon S3
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Search engine -- Elasticsearch
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Hosting model -- Serverless and Lambdas
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Integrations and API -- Mulesoft and Amazon API gateway.