Etele Plaza

Smart Plaza, Smart CRM – Marketing, Service, Community, and Heroku Cloud All in One Place

The collaboration between Attention CRM Consulting, a leading Salesforce implementation partner, and the Futureal Group, a major real estate developer in Central Europe, did not begin with Etele Plaza. Several other subsidiaries – including multiple Cordia residential projects and the HelloParks CRM system – were also delivered under their joint efforts. However, Etele Plaza was by far the most challenging. Two years of work preceded the go-live of the multi-cloud system powering the smart plaza – and the development work is still ongoing.

15 Years in the Making

The shopping center was not originally designed as a “smart” facility. As Tímea Szili, Communications and Marketing Director at Futureal Group, explains, more than fifteen years passed between the initial concept and the grand opening.

“Over time, our focus increasingly turned toward international trends. The main reason was that no new malls had opened in Hungary for over a decade, so the most relevant models were abroad – such as the Mall of Dubai or Westfield projects,”
says Tímea, who joined the project when the smart plaza concept was born, during the final third of the fifteen years of planning and brainstorming.

The Start of the Partnership

It quickly became clear that the team wanted to offer customers a modern front-end experience through a mobile app. However, the back-end architecture was addressed later.

“That’s when Attention came into the picture. We had already worked together extensively on Cordia projects and learned a lot about CRM systems. Even though we were from different divisions, there were clear synergies – and we knew that Attention’s approach could make the Etele project a success,”
recalls Tímea.

Attention’s needs assessment revealed that a highly complex process would need to be designed. The system had to serve mobile app and web interfaces, manage databases, handle marketing communications across multiple channels, support customer service, and provide tenants with a high-quality portal.

This meant that the foundation of the smart plaza ecosystem would rely on Salesforce, combining Marketing Cloud, Heroku Cloud, Service Cloud, and Community Cloud.

A key design goal was to create a largely self-operating system, manageable with minimal resources. According to László Nagy, Project Coordinator for Etele Plaza, working directly with Attention experts, achieving this was no simple task.

“We Had to Blaze the Trail”

“The challenge was that no one had built such a system before in Hungary, so there was no existing know-how. We had to blaze this trail together with our suppliers. We looked at international examples of how offline and online experiences complement each other, but you can’t achieve this with a single product. It required collaboration across multiple partners, and Attention played a key role in integrating everything into a dynamic system that communicates internally,”
says László.

Each Salesforce module played a critical role:

• Marketing Cloud manages communications, from campaigns to automated transactional emails.
• Service Cloud handles the central processes and database, triggering customer emails when updates occur.
• Community Cloud gives tenants a platform to manage cases and create content, which – through Heroku Cloud – automatically appears in the app and on the website.

“A key goal was to create a unified ecosystem where the mobile app, website, and information kiosks all draw from a single source. We saw many poor examples on the market, where customers received conflicting information across channels. In our system, when a tenant creates an offer or event in the portal, it appears consistently across all platforms after approval,”
László explains, recalling the hectic but exciting weeks leading up to the opening.

Continuous Innovation

Although the waterfall phase ended with the plaza’s opening, development continues in an agile format. The smart plaza will soon feature two major updates:

1. A loyalty system driven by CRM logic.
2. Smart parking, managed end-to-end by Salesforce – from entry to payment and exit.

“Together with Attention and other partners, we aim to deliver an experience beyond traditional shopping. Beyond new features, we plan to integrate more services into the ecosystem, such as movie schedules. Ultimately, our goal is to allow Etele Plaza visitors to manage everything in one place,”
concludes László Nagy.