Building Customer trust and ITOps partners with ThousandEyes
Overall Satisfaction with ThousandEyes
We use our ThousandEyes monitoring solution to create test paths, quality metrics and insights to the worldwide traffic. This is a partnership gamechanger for us – and my datacenter vendors like that I can talk to their level of understanding regional traffic and customer requirements. This creates a strong partnership with my providers and by extension better service to my customers.
Conversely to my providers, I can take our tests and provide live shares to our customer's Operations teams to drill down into response times, QOS and all delivery metrics from over 100 ThousandEyes test centers to our datacenters every few minutes. We test our 14 centers every 3-5 seconds from somewhere in the world.
They are core to our building trust in our services and our infrastructure. During Thanksgiving in 2016 when there was a 10Gb core route outage in Germany affecting all of central Europe and even routes to APAC and USA. TE alerted us early and we were able to provide charts and route issues to our affected customers. It changed what their perception was of “You are failing” to “the tubes were broken”. RichRelevance earned the trust of many of our customers in Europe that day. We were able to inform our customer faster and more detailed than their carrier/provider did – allowing them to get rerouted and back up within 30 mins. We have since used this tool to solve issues across the world within minutes, from bad routes to server latency, poor page loads or problematic customer implementations. We provide access to our Consultants, engineers and even customers via our NUC loaner program.
Since then we have expanded into using the Device Layer product, Agent to Agent testing and also bought the Intel NUC's that we share with customers to place ThousandEyes Enterprise agents inside their networks when they are experiencing issues. This provides true round-trip end to end metrics/insights via their Agent to Agent testing. This has created a really great partnership with the merchant's tech teams and RichRelevance's - having champions in the IT department is an awesome card to carry.
- Agent to Agent testing. Full round trip test. Have a customer using a Server Side API that is having an issue. Loan a Nuc, or have them install the ThousandEyes agent in their network. You'll find the issue guaranteed.
- Device Layer vision - ability to see from the server, through the Firewall, switches Proxy and internet. Measure jitter, latency, response time, load time and see the path your packet takes.
- Share your tests live. Provide the customer a link to a live test, they can see what you do, review your metrics and verify your tests. They can also use it as a tool to better their service. Build the trust and stickiness with your customers' most difficult users - the IT Operations team.
- Validate your QOS and routes for VOIP, video conferences, and data traffic. Highly flexible and configurable complete with transaction-based testing, custom headers, calls and tools to mimic any scenario you need.
- Continue to innovate and support more and more services. In the world of IOT and point to point traffic being more and more prevalent creating a flexible product is fantastic. Build on the end user product, last mile and even more sharing.
- Building the trust from our Merchants is core when you come to renewal time. Trust builds partnerships, builds stickiness and allows for easier upsells or contract renewals.
- Having a champion in IT that touts your service is important to the business, it removes a large portion of friction in the business to get services implemented and working to its peak.
- Flexibility in pricing can be better. How they measure the number of agents being used can get thorny. When you build and tear down virtual servers a lot it can appear there are more agents running than there are. Once we understood how they measure we were able to better utilize the product efficiently.