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ShyftLabs

Retail · Customer data infrastructure

ShyftLabs modernized how a major North American retailer accesses and protects customer information, giving business teams simpler, more secure access to consistent customer data at scale

Retail
  • Active customer identities
  • Monthly requests supported
  • Consistent customer record across services

At a glance

Client
Major North American retailer
Industry
Retail
Solution
Customer master data access and security modernization
Scale
25M+ active customers
Users
Sales, marketing, product, and business intelligence teams

The challenge

The retailer had already established a central customer record to maintain consistent identities across its business. However, as more teams and applications relied on it, multiple integration methods increased development effort, while systems often received more or less information than they needed.

Long-lived shared credentials introduced security risks and made access controls harder to manage as usage grew. The challenge wasn’t the quality of the customer data, but making it consistently accessible, secure, and practical for every team and application that depended on it.

The data foundation

Building on the retailer’s existing master customer record, we modernized data access across business applications to enable secure, consistent, and efficient use of customer information

  • Consistent identity

    Preserve a reliable customer record across connected applications and business functions.

  • Selective access

    Allow systems to request only the customer information required for their specific use cases.

  • Secure connectivity

    Establish standardized access methods that reduce integration complexity and strengthen data protection.

What we built

A modernized access layer that simplifies how applications retrieve customer information while maintaining consistent security and governance

  1. 01

    Simplify

    A standardized interface replaces multiple integration paths with a defined set of supported connection methods, making it easier for applications to work with customer data.

  2. 02

    Control

    Flexible data requests allow teams to retrieve precisely the information needed for each use case, reducing unnecessary processing and limiting excess data exposure.

  3. 03

    Protect

    Modern, dynamic authentication replaces long-lived shared credentials, strengthening access controls and reducing the risks associated with static keys.

Together, these capabilities give business applications a consistent, secure way to access the customer master record without changing the underlying source of truth.

The outcome

The retailer now has a simpler, more secure way to make customer information available across business functions, while its master record continues to support more than 111 million requests each month.

For development teams, standardized connectivity means fewer custom integration paths to build and maintain. Applications can request only the information they need, reducing unnecessary data handling and simplifying downstream workflows.

Replacing shared credentials with dynamic access controls also strengthens the retailer’s ability to protect sensitive customer information as more services connect.

Sales, marketing, product, and analytics teams can work from consistent customer identities without the complexity of navigating multiple access methods.

The result is a customer data foundation designed to support growing enterprise demand while maintaining consistency, security, and control.