Industry
Manufacturing
Future-Ready Manufacturing: Partnering in your journey to a sustainable manufacturing enterprise
Highlights
- Linde, a global leader in industrial gases and engineering, developed a modern customer experience platform designed around a seamless, intuitive UI/UX. Built on Salesforce Experience Cloud, the platform unifies several backend systems into a single frontend, enabling consistent customer interactions across eCommerce, marketing, and self-service capabilities.
- Linde was undergoing a major digital transformation initiative to unify its content-driven brand experience with a robust commerce platform and faced CMS implementation challenges and eCommerce feature challenges.
- The customer partnered with TCS to design and implement a scalable, secure digital experience that addressed key business priorities and enabled future growth using Salesforce Experience Cloud, Salesforce CMS, marketing cloud personalization scenarios, lead and query forms, and eCommerce capabilities.
- In addition, a global customer identity management solution was integrated to deliver secure, unified authentication and profile management across all channels.
On this page
Overview
Modernizing customer engagement through scalable secure solutions.
Linde, a global leader in industrial gases and engineering, launched a strategic initiative to modernize its digital platform by designing and implementing a new fully integrated frontend on Salesforce Experience Cloud leveraging several backend systems.
The program was executed in two phases: CMS implementation and eCommerce feature development. The goal was to deliver a secure, scalable, and user-friendly experience while empowering business teams to manage content and marketing independently.
As part of the initial rollout, Linde enabled a new content management approach that allows marketing teams to manage and publish content quickly and independently. Intuitive page components and templates give teams the flexibility to tailor content to their needs, while built in guardrails automatically enforce brand guidelines, visual and web accessibility standards.
In the second iteration, redesign included a new state-of-the-art customer portal and UIX based on Figma designs, covering eCommerce features like registration via customer identity management system to provide secure, unified customer authentication and profile management across channels, product listing, product details, add to cart, order management, invoice and billing, and account details.
Challenges
Key challenges hindering digital transformation.
CMS implementation challenges.
Linde was undergoing a major digital transformation initiative to unify its content-driven brand experience with a robust commerce platform. The key challenges included:
- Phased go live complexity: The need to split go-live between content-based website and eCommerce features across two regions (UK and Ireland) introduced operational risk and required meticulous planning to maintain brand consistency and minimize downtime.
- Multi system integration: Seamless integration with critical third-party systems such as secure container to manage marketing tags, SEO tools, AI based Search, CDN, and live chat, was essential to ensure performance, discoverability, and customer engagement.
- Dynamic content flexibility: A post-development requirement for dynamic template capabilities emerged, driven by the business need for rapid content updates to support marketing campaigns and seasonal promotions without heavy IT dependency.
- URL and security compliance: Ensuring smooth handling of URL redirects and adherence to Content Security Policy (CSP) and trusted URLs was crucial for maintaining SEO rankings and security compliance during migration.
- Customer interaction readiness: Preparing query and contact forms ahead of go-live was critical to enable customer support workflows and avoid disruptions in lead capture and service requests.
eCommerce feature challenges:
As part of the customer’s digital commerce modernization initiative, the eCommerce platform needed to deliver high-performance, secure, and scalable experiences while integrating with multiple enterprise systems. The key challenges included:
- Performance bottlenecks: Multiple real-time API callouts to critical systems such as eCommerce, customer identity management system, ERP, payment gateway, and marketing cloud introduced latency issues, impacting page load times and overall customer experience during peak traffic.
- Resilient error handling: The complexity of managing external system failures required robust error handling and retry mechanisms to ensure transaction continuity and prevent revenue leakage.
- Legacy system constraints: API rate limits and dependencies on legacy systems with limited documentation posed significant risks to integration timelines and operational stability.
- Session management and caching: Maintaining session state without storing sensitive data in Salesforce demanded innovative caching strategies to balance performance with compliance.
- Payment security compliance: Ensuring secure tokenization and compliance for payment flows was critical to meet PCI DSS standards and protect customer trust.
- Advanced security protocols: Implementing OAuth, JWT, and encryption for API calls was essential to safeguard data integrity and prevent unauthorized access across the ecosystem.
Solution
Scalable, secure digital experience.
The customer partnered with TCS to design and implement a scalable, secure digital experience that addressed these priorities and enabled future growth leveraging Salesforce Experience Cloud, Salesforce CMS, marketing cloud (personalization scenarios), lead and query forms, eCommerce features, enhanced with customer identity management to provide secure, unified customer authentication and profile management across channels. Key solution components included:
TCS implemented Salesforce CMS with a dynamic template architecture, enabling business teams to create, modify, and publish content independently without developer intervention. This accelerated marketing agility and reduced time-to-market for campaigns.
TCS has built a custom LWR-based Salesforce Experience Cloud community tailored for Linde, ensuring responsive, user experience across regions, including workflow capabilities like time-based publishing and menu adaptation. AI-based search was integrated for advanced search functionality, while CDN, AI-based search, eCommerce, and customer identity management system, CDN were leveraged to enhance site performance globally. GRC platform was implemented for cookie compliance, and robust monitoring tools ensured regulatory compliance and site stability. Additionally, adequate user training was provided to empower business teams to manage content independently.
For eCommerce, TCS adopted a headless architecture using Salesforce Experience Cloud, orchestrating API calls via External external Services services to minimize latency and improve responsiveness.
TCS also leveraged asynchronous processing and CDN caching for static content, ensuring global performance consistency to optimize the performance.
CDN caching accelerated static content delivery globally. JWT tokens secured session management without storing sensitive data in Salesforce. A logger framework implemented retry logic and circuit breakers for robust error handling.
Benefits
Benefits that transform content management and customer experience.
Linde achieved significant improvements by implementing Salesforce CMS, empowering business teams with full control over content management and reducing dependency on IT. Dynamic CMS templates enabled faster content updates and reduced time-to-market for campaigns, while mobile-responsive designs enhanced user experience across devices.
Site performance and search capabilities were optimized through CDN and AI- based search integration, complemented by CDN caching and API orchestration to reduce latency. The platform offered a pre-production environment for content publishing and preview, seamless integration with SEO tools, secure container to manage marketing tags, and third-party systems, and active monitoring for swift resolution of hyper-care issues.
A scalable, flexible architecture supports future enhancements without heavy dependency on Salesforce data storage, while security and compliance were strengthened through JWT-based session management. Operational efficiency improved with asynchronous processing and caching strategies, driving faster response times. These enhancements collectively boosted personalization, conversion, and retention rates, delivering a secure, agile, and high-performing digital experience.
What the client says
Delivering this customer experience platform was a demanding journey, and the commitment and collaboration of the TCS team played a key role in its success. Together, we modernized our digital landscape by leveraging a combination of technologies, including Salesforce Experience Cloud, marketing cloud, and personalization, to build a strong foundation for continued innovation. The result is a scalable, future ready platform that strengthens our customer experience and positions the business for future growth.