SR-SSB

Integration Platform

A dynamic and innovative system, the SR-SSB, Separate Reality’s Smart Service Bus, is our advanced integration platform which has been designed to streamline your processes and unify your customer experience.

An enhanced ESB, the SR-SSB connects diverse systems into one front-end to deliver a cohesive customer experience. The SR-SSB encompasses all aspects of your customer journey, from billing systems, user and subscription management to consumer top-ups, business bulk ordering and point-of-sale signup. It can plug into the many systems a customer has, which it then presents as one through a single unified API on which other systems can connect.

The SR-SSB has been augmented with business-focused capabilities all of which have been created to add real value to your business. This includes user experience acceleration technologies as well as an extensive and powerful product catalogue designed for online purchasing. The user-friendly application gives your customers more control over interactions with your brand across multiple touchpoints, which can lead to improved customer service levels and decreased call centre demands.

With the SR-SSB, businesses can swiftly and efficiently connect their existing applications, transforming their digital architecture without the need to immediately replace or upgrade legacy systems. The result is a solution which leverages your existing systems and protects investments whilst delivering new capabilities quickly into the market.

An investment for the long-term, the SR-SSB is designed to evolve with your business. New back-end systems can be easily added or swapped with no impact on other components, and front-end elements can be changed quickly – all at a low cost of change, resulting in a low cost of ownership.

eCommerce Platform

The eCommerce functionality of the SR-SSB has been developed to bolster your customer journey and provide a seamless shopping experience. It is not simply a shopping basket and payment gateway.

Systems that plug onto the SR-SSB can ask questions like “what products can this customer buy?”, “what discount will I get if I have these 3 items in the shopping basket?”.
The shopping basket allows multiple types of items in the basket allowing operators to mix and match what they sell.
The shopping basket can be ‘parked’ so that a different system can pick it up, supporting your sales retention and resell opportunities.
Customers can choose to pay using a plethora of payment mechanisms from Credit Card to Apple Pay/G-Pay, to in-store cash payments. Customers can also choose in-app cash payments in which the app produces a bar code for scanning in a physical store.
Payment processing is PCI Compliant.
The platform comes with transaction management capabilities, this means that if a basket contains multiple dependent items and the last one fails, the rest of the items are rolled-back, and the payment refunded. This results in an automated self-cleaning operation and a happy customer.

An Omni-Channel Experience

Because of the unified API and customer-centric model of the SR-SSB, you can have many applications such as portals and widgets, each of which reads the same data but manipulate and interpret it differently. This allows you to easily analyse your customer experience, enhance your user journey and bolster your processes.

For example, with the SR-SSB one app may focus on fast top-up, whereas a call centre application will read the same data but will focus on a 360-view of the whole customer and a sales-agent app can focus on enabling field agents to process and sign-up new customers as quickly as possible.

An elegant aspect of the customer-centric model is an easy Single Sign On, whereby a user can use the same credentials to log into multiple applications such as apps or portals – simplifying your user journey.

Extensive Catalogue

Central to the SR-SSB is our extensive online sales Catalog which in essence determines what a user can buy, and the programmed rules dictate how a user can purchase from you. With our Catalog you can effortlessly manage your inventory and how you sell it.

Our Catalog can contain items from multiple back-end systems and the rules can control multiple scenarios. It is also used to drive which back-end systems are spoken to as well as when and how they speak to each other, and when a transaction is made it will communicate with the relevant back-end system.

Not only does the Catalog drive a user’s purchasing process and orchestrate order fulfilment but the Catalog products can also be branded individually which leads to a more engaged user experience and in-app product placement for partners. With a focus on practicality and managing the cost of change the Catalog can be changed and re-loaded into the SR-SSB at any time with a real time change happening in the apps!

Templated Outbound Communications

In today’s technological climate, interaction with customers is more important than ever. There are numerous ways in which our clients can interact with their customers using our product stack. This includes communication via email, SMS and push notifications.

Tailored to your business and your customers, the contents of the outbound communications are all controlled by a content-template system managed from the SR-SSB. This includes the wording, branding, message and personal information such as name or salutation. In addition, templates can also be made available in multiple languages and the language that gets chosen can be driven by the customer’s preferences which in turn can be informed by app interaction.

The outbound communications templates can be loaded and updated instantaneously, allowing you swift communication with your customers at a low cost of change.

The SR-SSB can also deliver push notifications direct to specific apps which can be used for in-app marketing.

Customer Preference Management

The SR-SSB can master customer preferences such as preferred payment method, language, delivery address, communication preferences, marketing preferences, authorised contacts/people, trouble ticketing and account notes – to name but a few.

Informed Business Intelligence

We know informed intelligence is key to understanding performance and driving future business decisions, therefore the SR-SSB can generate and send reports of configurable frequency on any of the data available within the system. What’s more, new reports can be easily added in line with your business intelligence needs. Examples of reports include the number of add-ons purchased in a day, the number of completed top ups, average spend, number of bills paid, and new users registered to the system. Reports can be delivered as an email and/or uploaded into data marts.

Effective Data Caching

In order to overcome typical network latency issues and common bottlenecks, improve robustness and provide the best performance, the SR-SSB employs data-caching and asynchronous refresh approaches in line with current best practice software engineering patterns used in high-availability systems.

High Availability Set Up

The SR-SSB can be deployed to cloud environments, ground-based environments, or a hybrid combination of the two. This lends itself to an ultra-high availability set up as well as providing flexible scalability through the use of cloud-native features.

Open API

The SR-SSB presents all this capability in an easy to navigate, unified, REST API using the Open API specification. This API gives developers access to 350+ use cases. Importantly, the Open API specification means that the time for developers to write new code is reduced and existing resources can be reused – this means you benefit from a lower cost of ownership.