7.62But improve it further

Ask:

Should a synchronous user request really wait while Salesforce retries several times?

Maybe:

yes

if latency expectations allow.

Maybe better:

POST /customers
 ↓
validate
 ↓
queue request
 ↓
202 Accepted

Then worker retries Salesforce independently.

That distinction—synchronous error recovery vs asynchronous processing—is exactly what we'll cover later.