Building Customer Trust

The Thanksgiving Surprise

On one of the busiest weekends of online retail shopping,Thanksgiving Day, RichRelevance got a call from one of their clients in EMEA complaining that they were unable to see any recommendations. However, RichRelevance data centers located in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Stockholm serving EMEA were at 100% availability and processing algorithms for personalized recommendations. At that time, Kevin's team was trialling ThousandEyes and decided to put the product to the ultimate test. He used the Path Visualization view to immediately narrow down the issue to a congested 10G ISP link just outside of Frankfurt, Germany that was affecting service in EMEA. His team was able to contact their co-location vendors and customers and reroute traffic around the ISP. Kevin recounts, "Previously, we would manually run pings, traceroutes and start calling our vendors trying to figure out what was going on. It would have taken us hours to troubleshoot and triangulate the problem. But, with ThousandEyes, we were able to turn around and get our services back online in 30 minutes, while it took our upstream ISP provider four hours to resolve the choked link. The ability to solve problems in minutes versus hours or days with ThousandEyes is fantastic."

Building the Circle of Trust

With ThousandEyes, RichRelevance has been able to elevate the level of conversation and build trust with their customers. The interactive share links from ThousandEyes make things transparent between vendors and customers, avoiding traditional finger pointing. A more recent example was when RichRelevance noticed that one of their customers' public website was taking too long to load. Page Load tests that provide a waterfall view of load times of different components on the page, RichRelevance attributed the slowness to a 48% wait time on some components. The web server was also downloading images serially instead of opening parallel connections which also contributed to the slow page loads. With this information, Kevin's team was able to help their customer double the speed of their page.

"The best thing that ThousandEyes has done for RichRelevance is to build the trust of our merchants and customers. When before, there was a lot of finger pointing, we now collaborate towards a solution. It has changed the way we do business, which is great," says Kevin.