How a Technical Architect Integrates Client Needs with Ingenuity

Technical architect Aashka Shah has spent almost a decade working with clients. She’s worked on long-term projects and short ones, with enterprises and business analysts, but each project has come down the same basic structure: her team and a client must combine their individual processes and systems together to create a unified solution. It’s a little like a temporary platform integration.

“It’s two different systems working or talking to each other,” says Aashka, explaining integrations and why she finds them so interesting. “You learn about both of them and also the middleware which is communicating between them.”

It’s easy to see the parallels. The client has one system, with existing technologies, business models, and technical processes. CommerceCX has another: a system of architects, analysts, and developers, who bring combined decades of experience to solving problems. Technical teams like Aashka’s are the middleware: the intersection of where CommerceCX’s knowledge meets a client need.

But clients need more than technical expertise when working with a company like CommerceCX—they need confidence and trust in a technical teams’ ability.

That confidence starts behind the scenes at CommerceCX. As an IT services company, CommerceCX has a lot of knowledge. But, just as importantly, it’s a space where people feel comfortable admitting they need help.

“There is no need to be afraid or hesitant to ask questions,” Aashka says about her experience working with her colleagues. “People have made it quite clear, saying ‘please feel free to reach out to us in case you have any doubts.’”

Providing a good service starts at home. A report from Eagle Hill shows that poor employee experiences have a direct impact on client experience; that when employees are frustrated or worried or stressed, it impacts the work they do. On the other hand, if folks are supported and made to feel safe, they can achieve great things.

“We’ve generally invested ahead in folks,” explains Vinay Toomu, CEO of CommerceCX. “Ring-fenced them, provide them a safe space where they will not be judged. And I’ve seen some amazing things happen in this organization thanks to a lot of these folks.”

For Aashka, a major support is her ability to work from home in Ahmedabad, which was not often an option when she applied for jobs. Most Salesforce and IT services companies in India are based out of cities like Bangalore and Pune—even CCX’s India headquarters is based in Hyderabad. In another work-from-home environment, this distance might be isolating, but Aashka says leadership makes a concerted effort to make her feel included.

“Vasanth, even as a managing director, he’s so open,” she says about Vasanth Mosoor, Head of India Operations. “As soon as I start the day, I see a ping from Vasanth wishing me a good morning, which is such a positive thing.”

That warmth is more than just incidental—it’s key to fostering an environment of learning and outreach. Research by Gallup shows that leadership’s building a rapport with colleagues helps engage team members and makes people more receptive to feedback and discussion. It’s also a great motivator.

“You feel positive, you want to take on new challenges, you want to work.”

And Aashka brings that positivity to the client-side. Working with clients means working with their system, their tribal knowledge, their process, and their needs. They dictate the goals of a project and what an implementation needs to do. The job of a technical architect like Aashka is figuring out how to bring in CommerceCX’s expertise, knowledge, and even warmth, to solving a client’s needs.

“Creating logic to solve problems is one of my passions.” Aashka’s voice grows warm when she talks about programming and you can almost hear the gears turning in her head as she thinks through examples of applying her knowledge to client problems. “Like creating programs to automate solutions.”

One of Aashka’s first clients at CommerceCX had an issue when trying to migrate a large amount of data from one system to another. Most of the data was being transferred manually and over the course of days, costing the client a lot of time and stress.

“As soon as I joined this project, I saw this pain point; so, I thought, why not automate it?”

Aashka quickly wrote a simple program to pull data from the original system and write it to a file type that the new system could import. This solution ended up expediting the data migration significantly, reducing time and stress for both the client and the technical team. And, importantly, it was entirely self-driven.

“This is almost always encouraged in projects,” Aashka says. “As soon as you create something which lessens even 10 minutes of work for anyone, it is encouraged. And this is something that was taking more than a few days.”

According to Harvard Business Review, giving a team the freedom to direct their work promotes employee engagement and creates better solutions. The openness of CommerceCX’s environment gives space for experts like Aashka to provide their best work to customers. It only makes sense: folks like Aashka know their jobs best because they do them every day.

Folks like Aashka don’t just bring CommerceCX’s technical expertise to the table with their clients, they bring the systems’ warmth and support and drive to create solutions that help people. And clients have noticed the difference.

“Clients know that if you go to CommerceCX, your problem will be solved in a much more efficient way,” says long-time CCXer Venkatesh “Venky” Muppalaneni, about work done by people like Aashka. “They are happy with those things, those approaches.”

Support and security give Aashka the energy and motivation she needs to do amazing things for clients and her team. Plus, it lets her work with real integrations.

“I get to learn about both ecosystems, like what input is needed on one side, and how it’s configured on the other side as well. It’s an advanced part of programming,” she says. “I would like to explore it more.”

This article is part of our series Stories of CommerceCX, which seeks to collect and record employee experiences into a series of articles exploring their history and growth and how CommerceCX’s investment in goodwill and employees’ quality-of-life leads to positive business results. Read more Stories of CCX here.