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Regional Energy Company Improves Customer Experience
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Networks & Connectivity - WiFi
Applicable Industries
- Utilities
Services
- System Integration
- Testing & Certification
The Challenge
The company was experiencing on‑going issues with their CRM system at many of their locations. Slow performance and outages were causing customers to experience delays on calls and when using the online portal to manage their account and pay their bill. The 3rd party CRM vendor reported the issues were most likely due to network latency and that should be evaluated first. A separate issue was occurring at remote locations where employees accessed 3rd party Cloud applications via Wi‑Fi connection. The user experience was not consistent, with some users enjoying immediate access and quick response times and others reporting delayed access and slow response times.
About The Customer
This large U.S. regional energy company employs 14,000 people across several states to manage the acquisition and delivery of natural gas as well as electric transmission, distribution, and power generation to millions of customers. Serving more than 5 million customers across a half dozen U.S. States makes access to customer records, repair history, and smart meter records essential for efficient day‑to‑day operation of their business. The company’s IT is an integral partner responsible for the selection, deployment and maintenance of technology to drive company performance. Customer service technology, both voice and self‑service applications, is key to their innovation and growth goals.
The Solution
The energy company is a long‑time user of the NETSCOUT® nGeniusONE platform with InfiniStreamNGs to monitor, report and triage multiple applications across several locations. However, the CRM was not regularly monitored. This, combined with the energy company’s recent upgrade to a 40 GB backbone created an opportunity to add new ISNG appliances. When the IT team focused instrumentation and workflow on the application, they immediately saw the reported delays. They also drilled into the network’s performance for latency issues only to discover that it was not actually the network causing the problem, rather, several of the application servers were overloaded, causing random and inconsistent response times. Other findings included disregard of TCP window sizing, with large files being sent that caused packets to drop and be re‑transmitted, and DNS look‑up problems with servers that did not have permissions. To further isolate and triage the issues, the company added nGeniusPULSE with contextual workflows from nGeniusONE to provide cross organizational teams with an integrated, cohesive view of servers and network devices that impact their performance of the CRM and other critical services. Using nGeniusPULSE, they saw the hop‑by‑hop path performance and pulled stats from the devices to find the times when the app servers were overloaded. This data helped the network teams see when the network path usage becomes compromised and showed exactly when path hops are used and where there are delays. To address the problems remote users were having accessing the cloud applications, the IT team used nGeniusPULSE virtual nPoints to verify the response time and path to the 3rd party servers. nGeniusPULSE tests revealed that the 2.4 GHz channels were overloaded; to resolve the problem they moved clients using mission‑critical applications to their 5 GHz channel.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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