What I worked on
The work centred on order and fulfilment flows at a volume where design choices you can get away with elsewhere stop working. Row-by-row processing that is fine for a few hundred records a day falls over at a few hundred thousand, so a lot of this was choosing between transactional integration and bulk loading, and knowing which one a given flow actually needed.
The other recurring theme was customer data. Consumer operations tend to accumulate the same person several times over across channels, and downstream reporting quietly inherits the mess. Getting service and customer records to line up between the CX and ERP sides — and keeping them lined up as both changed — was steady, unglamorous, high-value work.
Systems & platforms
Representative work
High-volume order and fulfilment flows
Integrations sized for daily volume rather than a demo, using bulk import where per-record calls would not hold up, with batch-level monitoring so a partial failure was visible without reading logs.
Customer and service data alignment
Flows keeping customer and service records consistent between the CX and ERP sides, including the deduplication and matching rules that decided when two records were one person.
Reconciliation reporting
Scheduled comparisons between source and target counts and values, surfacing drift as a report the business could read instead of an incident someone eventually noticed.
What the sector taught me
Consumer work is where I learned to design for the volume that will exist rather than the volume in the test environment. It also made me suspicious of any integration that cannot tell you, cheaply, whether it actually moved everything it was supposed to.