With Azure DocumentDB, Tata Neu delivers seamless authentication for millions of users, accelerates credit card onboarding across partners, unifies loyalty programs for hundreds of millions of members, and powers AI-driven support experiences across more than 60 brands.

This article is coauthored by Anurag Mathur, the VP and Head of Foundational Services at Tata Digital, and Bhaskar Chellappa, the VP and Head of TechOps at Tata Digital

Introducing Tata Neu: Tata Digital’s unified app  

Tata Neu is designed to deliver an extensive yet highly personalized shopping experience. The culmination of more than two years of research, development, and testing, it brings together the Tata group’s most trusted brands in a single, convenient platform. With offerings that span electronics, groceries, travel, hospitality, health, and more, Tata Neu provides a breadth of choice and versatility that stands apart. 

Powering personalized, cross-brand customer journeys 

From compelling offers and a unified loyalty program to diverse payment options and exclusive benefits, Tata Neu creates a seamless, cross-category experience for millions of users. Customers can:  

• Style up their wardrobe with Tata CLiQ and Westside 

• Purchase the latest gadgets from Croma 

• Order groceries from bigbasket 

• Book a flight on Air India 

• Get health checkups or purchase medications through Tata 1mg 

• Book a luxurious stay at an IHCL hotel 

• Order a 5-star meal on Qmin 

Scaling the platform behind Tata Neu’s all-in-one experience 

As Tata Neu expanded to support millions of customers across dozens of Tata brands, the underlying data platform needed to evolve with it. Tata Digital set out to modernize its systems using Azure DocumentDB (previously vCore-based Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB), focusing on performance, scale, resiliency, security, and cost efficiency. 

Many core services were originally architected several years ago. As traffic patterns grew more complex and data volumes surged, Tata Digital needed a platform capable of handling significantly higher workloads and reducing operational overhead. 

Strengthening Single sign-on performance for Tata Neu’s most demanding workloads 

Single sign-on (SSO) serves as the unified entry point for Tata Neu and multiple Tata brands requiring centralized authentication. As one of Tata Digital’s key services, it supports millions of active transacting users and must withstand sudden traffic spikes driven by campaigns or seasonal peaks. 

The authentication workflow incorporates multi-factor authentication, sending one-time passwords (OTPs) to users’ devices or email and issuing OAuth2 tokens upon successful login. Managing these artifacts at scale—while maintaining an SLA of under 100 milliseconds per transaction—is essential for keeping login experiences smooth and reliable. 

“Azure DocumentDB provides the dependable performance, elasticity, and consistency needed to power Tata Digital’s authentication platform at scale.” – Vinay Vaidya, Chief Technology and Product Officer, Tata Digital

Before adopting Azure DocumentDB, unexpected surges could trigger throttling or latency, especially during high-demand events. Azure DocumentDB’s improved indexing behavior and partition-free scaling address these challenges directly, helping SSO remain responsive even when authentication volumes rise sharply. Its high-throughput, low-latency design ensures that hundreds of requests per second are processed without delay, giving Tata Digital confidence during peak loads. 

Cost predictability is equally important for always-on systems like SSO. Azure DocumentDB’s transparent vCore-based model helps Tata Digital manage spending more effectively, avoiding the unpredictability of purely usage-based models and providing clearer visibility as user adoption grows. 

Security and compliance requirements remain uncompromising for authentication workloads. Azure DocumentDB provides enterprise-grade encryption, private network access, and native integration with Azure identity and access management to protect sensitive data such as OTPs and tokens.

Operational agility is enhanced through automatic data expiration (TTL indexes), which simplifies lifecycle management for short-lived authentication artifacts. Compatibility with MongoDB APIs also allowed Tata Digital to adopt Azure DocumentDB quickly within the existing authentication stack, with support from Microsoft engineering during migration and early optimization. 

Altogether, Azure DocumentDB provides the dependable performance, elasticity, and consistency needed to power Tata Digital’s authentication platform at scale. 

Centralizing customer onboarding and data flows for co-branded credit cards 

As Tata Digital modernized additional mission-critical services beyond authentication, the customer information management system for co-branded credit cards—including forex and standard variants—became a key area of focus. This platform acts as a centralized system for managing diverse customer data from multiple banking partners. Designed for flexibility and speed, the system captures key customer details and performs necessary validations. It then connects with partner systems to handle KYC checks and deliver real-time updates on application status. 

Built on Azure DocumentDB, the solution handles hundreds of thousands customers per month using dynamic schemas and change streams to keep workflows efficient. In addition to managing customer data, Azure DocumentDB also stores key application configurations, including brand API URLs, brand-specific landing page URLs, API timeout values, and Redis TTL settings. This centralization helps maintain consistent behaviour and stable performance across multiple campaigns. 

Unifying loyalty experiences across the Tata ecosystem 

One of the key objectives of the Tata Neu app is to foster brand loyalty among users through features like NeuCoins (the reward program), integrated membership services (NeuPass), and financial and payment solutions including Tata Pay. NeuPass is Tata Neu’s unified loyalty program, bringing these benefits into a single experience that spans everything from everyday essentials and electronics to fashion, travel, health, and hospitality. 

Previously, each Tata consumer brand operated its own loyalty program, which often left customers managing rewards across multiple companies. NeuPass brings these efforts together, unifying brand-level programs into a single membership experience that feels far more cohesive and predictable. Members earn NeuCoins when they shop with participating brands and can redeem them anywhere across the Tata Neu ecosystem. 

Today, NeuPass serves more than several hundred million members, and continues to grow. Its loyalty management system, powered by Azure DocumentDB, supports both Tata Consumer Program (TCP) and non-TCP flows while delivering the scale and performance required to handle rising participation and high transaction volumes. 

Delivering scalable, intelligent customer support with Azure DocumentDB and agentic AI 

Customer support is a critical part of Tata Neu’s experience, especially in an ecosystem that spans millions of customers across e-commerce (Croma, Tata1mg, Tata CLiQ, BigBasket, IHCL, Air India) and financial services (insurance, credit cards, loans, investments). Tata Digital must provide timely, consistent, and personalized assistance across both synchronous channels like chatbots and asynchronous channels such as email at significant scale. 

In a multi-brand, multi-domain environment, where a single interaction might involve a delayed grocery order and an investment-related question, traditional rule-based systems quickly become brittle, leading to escalations and delays. To address this, Tata Digital uses agentic AI, a new paradigm of autonomous, goal-oriented agents that automate and orchestrate customer support across brands and categories. This approach combines natural language understanding, workflow reasoning, and human-in-the-loop oversight to resolve diverse queries with speed, precision, and empathy. 

Azure DocumentDB underpins this experience by powering AI-driven support across more than 60 brands and categories. The conversational chatbot handles queries such as order status, returns, cancellations, NeuPass or NeuCoins disputes, refunds, and payment issues. Whether resolving a KYC question or a hotel refund request, agentic AI (backed by Azure DocumentDB) delivers consistent, scalable service across channels. 

More than 6,000 FAQs are vectorized and stored in Azure DocumentDB, enabling fast semantic search for relevant answers. Azure DocumentDB also manages conversational history, log analytics, configuration data, and response content, supporting 10,000–11,000 unique chatbot conversations each day, with roughly 40 percent of responses powered by vector search. 

For customers who prefer email, Tata Digital uses an email response bot built with Power Automate and an agentic framework. This bot, also backed by Azure DocumentDB for FAQs and analytics, supports 11 brands—including IHCL, BigBasket, and Croma—and processes around 1,000 emails daily using a corpus of 3,500 FAQs. Approximately 30 percent of responses come from Azure DocumentDB-powered retrieval, improving the structure and clarity of replies, enhancing traceability, and significantly reducing turnaround time—from 6–7 days to about 3–4 days for complex scenarios, and automating roughly 90 percent of simple queries. 

Fueling Tata Neu’s next wave of intelligent experiences with Azure 

As Tata Digital looks ahead, the team plans to deepen its use of Azure services to unlock even richer customer experiences. Databricks already plays a central role in unifying insights across the 14 Tata brands, and that footprint will continue to expand as Tata Neu advances its cross-sell and personalization strategy. With broader data intelligence, targeted recommendations, and richer campaign orchestration, Tata Digital aims to strengthen customer engagement across categories while continuing to modernize underlying systems. Azure DocumentDB remains a foundational layer in this journey, helping the platform scale confidently as adoption grows and new digital experiences come online.