Salon Franchise Customer Identity

Background

This work predates Smith Advanced Systems' founding as an independent AI and technology research lab. The client, a multi-brand salon franchise operator, runs one of North America's largest franchise networks — thousands of locations across the US and Canada. Each location operated its own point-of-sale system in isolation, with no centralized record of customer identity or visit history. Duplicate and inconsistent customer records accumulated location by location, and cross-location customer intelligence was effectively impossible.

Problem

POS systems ran independently at every location, with no real-time link to a single customer identity. A returning customer could exist as a dozen different records depending on which location, which visit, which staff member entered the data — no way to recognize or serve that customer consistently from one location to the next. Customer-data interaction volume ran in the high millions per week, and a material share of that volume, every week, was genuinely new customers rather than duplicates. The gap widened daily.

Solution

Designed and implemented a centralized customer identity platform on Informatica IDMC, establishing one authoritative customer record across the entire franchise network.

• Resolved 100M+ customer records across all locations in the initial load
• Designed match/merge rules and survivorship logic for the franchise data model
• Built custom API endpoints in Informatica CAI (Cloud Application Integration) for real-time data exchange between POS systems and the identity platform
• Engineered for six-figure daily transaction volume, multiple API calls per transaction, and sustained four-digit API calls per second at peak — across thousands of locations