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Headless 360Architect (Hardest)customer-360apigraphqlprofiles

Architect Customer 360 APIs for external channel consumption

Real World Scenario

A partner portal and IVR system need unified customer context—recent orders, open cases, loyalty tier—from Salesforce without direct CRM UI access.

Expected Answer

• Define Customer 360 API layer aggregating CRM, Commerce, and Data Cloud attributes • Use GraphQL or composite REST to minimize round trips for channel apps • Apply OAuth client credentials with scoped permissions per channel partner • Cache read-heavy profile slices with TTL; never cache auth-sensitive fields • Rate limiting and quota per API consumer preventing partner abuse • Field-level security and consent checks before returning marketing attributes to IVR • SLA monitoring with synthetic probes from each consuming channel

Follow-Up Questions & Answers

Click to expand — each follow-up includes a direct, interview-ready answer

Main difference: use case and scale. Define Customer 360 API layer aggregating CRM, Commerce, and Data Cloud attributes. Use GraphQL or composite REST to minimize round trips for channel apps. Pick based on your integration pattern and team capability. Customer 360 APIs are product interfaces—design for channel needs, not CRM object shapes. Document the decision in an ADR and align with enterprise standards.

Architect Perspective

Customer 360 APIs are product interfaces—design for channel needs, not CRM object shapes. One aggregated contract beats exposing 12 raw objects.