Customer 360 Architecture for a Global Fashion Brand

Situation

Lacoste, the iconic French fashion house, needed to unify its global CRM architecture around a Customer 360 vision — a single, complete view of every customer across all touchpoints and channels. The engagement involved directing a €2M+ CRM portfolio and securing Global Executive Board validation for a 5-year digital roadmap that would define how Lacoste used Salesforce for the next half-decade.

The stakes were high. Board-level programs carry a different quality of scrutiny than standard delivery engagements. Every architectural decision would be visible to the people who controlled the budget, the timeline, and the decision to proceed. Success had to be defined before a single line of configuration was written.

Challenge

“Customer 360” is simultaneously the most-cited goal in enterprise CRM and the hardest to actually deliver. It requires unifying data generated by fundamentally different systems: in-store POS, e-commerce platforms, marketing automation, customer service, loyalty programs, and B2B wholesale accounts. Each system generates its own version of the same customer. Each operates on its own data model, its own identifiers, and its own refresh cadence. Unifying them isn’t a configuration task — it’s an architecture problem.

The organizational challenge matched the technical one. Six business units needed to align behind a single architectural vision. A 30-person cross-functional team needed to execute in parallel across workstreams. Any failure in stakeholder alignment would surface as a launch failure, and the program had no tolerance for that outcome given its board-level visibility.

The risk profile was also structural. Programs of this scale and complexity typically surface failure conditions late — after significant investment, when scope changes are expensive and organizational patience is depleted. The architecture function had to identify and resolve these risks before they became delivery problems, not after.

Action

Customer 360 Architecture Design

The architectural foundation was a unified customer data layer that resolved identity across all six channels: in-store, online, wholesale, service, loyalty, and marketing. Rather than patching point-to-point integrations between existing systems, the architecture was designed as a single customer record of truth with well-defined ingestion patterns for each data source.

This required explicit decisions about how Lacoste defined a “customer” — a definition that six business units, each with legitimate but different perspectives, had to agree on. The data model established canonical definitions: customer identity resolution rules, household relationships, product ownership attributes, engagement history structure, and the fields that were required versus optional at each touchpoint.

Risk Architecture and Operational Continuity Framework

Rather than discovering risks during delivery, a structured pre-launch risk identification process mapped the 50+ strategic risks across the program — technical integration risks, data quality risks, organizational alignment risks, vendor delivery risks, and timeline dependencies. Each risk was categorized by severity and likelihood, and a mitigation or contingency plan was defined before the delivery phase began.

The framework operated as a continuous process, not a one-time exercise. Risk status was tracked through delivery, with escalation protocols that ensured no risk resolution was delayed to the point where it became a delivery failure.

Stakeholder Alignment and Board Roadmap

Mobilizing a 30-person cross-functional team required more than project management — it required architectural authority. When business units had conflicting requirements, the architecture function provided the framework for resolution. When the roadmap required trade-off decisions between short-term scope and long-term scalability, the architecture provided the evidence base for those decisions.

The 5-year digital roadmap was designed with board-level communication in mind: clear investment phases, defined capability milestones, and explicit connections between architectural decisions and business outcomes. Board validation required not just technical approval but business commitment — the understanding that the architecture was making a claim about Lacoste’s competitive positioning, not just its IT infrastructure.

Result

The €2M+ CRM portfolio was delivered on time with the Customer 360 architecture operational across all six business units. The 50+ strategic risks identified pre-launch were resolved before they reached delivery — none became launch-blocking issues. All six business units achieved alignment behind the unified architecture.

The Global Executive Board validated the 5-year digital roadmap, providing the organizational commitment that a multi-year architecture requires. The 30-person cross-functional team executed the transformation with a clarity of purpose that multi-stakeholder programs rarely achieve.

The Customer 360 architecture established a data foundation that anticipates where Salesforce is going. Salesforce Data Cloud was purpose-built to deliver exactly the unified customer view that was architected at Lacoste — identity resolution across channels, unified profile as the basis for all activation, real-time segmentation replacing batch processes. The architecture thinking is identical whether the implementation uses custom integration or Data Cloud. The difference is execution speed. With Data Cloud, the identity resolution and unification that took months to build custom now takes weeks to configure. But the architecture decisions — what defines a customer, how channels relate, what the downstream activation model requires — those don’t change. I’ve designed this architecture both ways. Data Cloud makes it faster. The thinking makes it work.

Technologies used: Salesforce Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, custom integration layer, data architecture design, stakeholder roadmap methodology, risk management framework