Unified Customer Experience Through Integration Platforms: A Case Study of Retail Digital Transformation

Abstract

This case study examines a major retail firm's digital transformation using Apache Kafka and Kubernetes to unify customer experiences across channels. The microservices architecture, guided by domain-driven design, established bounded contexts for customer data, inventory, and personalization while replacing batch processing with event streams. Blue-green and canary deployments via ArgoCD ensured zero-downtime updates, while service mesh technology provided observability and security. Chaos engineering validated system resilience through controlled failure injection. Results included 75% faster integration, 23% higher conversion rates, 99.95% availability, and improved customer satisfaction. The implementation demonstrates how event-driven architectures and container orchestration enable retailers to deliver personalized experiences at scale while maintaining operational stability.