All’s Well for Alltel

customer experience. Although My Circle isn’t Alltel’s first positive

CEM is designed to identify a defective trans- experience with CA Wily–the carrier has used action and aggregate all users experiencing it CA Wily’s Introscope^® solution since 2005 to into a single incident. CEM then prioritizes provide low-overhead, 24x7 monitoring for its incidents based on business impact and auto- Java based mission-critical applications–the matically triggers evidence collection to help success of CEM prompted Alltel to use it in Alltel’s IT staff eliminate the root cause of the other areas, too. For example, Alltel now uses problem. CEM’s zero-overhead design ensures CEM to monitor a variety of mission-critical, that the solution doesn’t use resources that customer-facing Web applications, as well as could be devoted to Alltel’s revenue-generat- business-to-business applications that carry ing applications and services. low volumes of high-value transactions.

During one review, Alltel’s Enterprise Tools Today, CEM monitors and records more than team determined that thousands of custom- half a million transactions per day on Alltel’s ers received an error message when updating Siebel-based applications, including My Circle.

“Web applications are critical business channels for Alltel, and we see superior
customer service as an important competitive differentiator,” said Mike Henning,
manager of enterprise tools at Alltel. “CEM helps us ensure our applications
deliver world-class performance for every customer and every transaction.”

their My Circle numbers. However, these cus- In the first six months of use at Alltel, CEM tomers weren’t reporting the failed transac- monitored and recorded more than 53 million tion error to customer service, so without the direct customer transactions, plus 18 million visibility provided by CEM, Alltel wouldn’t have transactions through approved resellers. known that the problem existed. With CEM, Alltel’s Enterprise Tools group

After reviewing the data captured by CEM, now has a complete historical record for SLA Alltel’s team identified the root cause: A logic reporting. CEM also gives the group a powerful error was causing customers to receive a tool for continuous improvement reporting. failed-transactionmessage eventhoughmore For example, an Alltel business analyst than half of the changes were successful. This reviewed CEM data for an application that al- problem had a ripple effect on the system lowed resellers to add a new line of service to because customers who received the incor- existing customer accounts. This application rect error message would try again multiple was processing transactions at a far lower times. Armed with this information, Alltel’s IT rate than the projected transaction volume. staff was able to implement a programming CEM enabled Alltel’s IT staff to determine change that immediately eliminated the in- that an error in the application was disabling correct error messages. the “add new line of service” button for some

“Web applications are critical business customers because of the way their Siebel- channels for Alltel, and we see superior cus- based account was configured. After modi- tomer service as an important competitive fying the application to ensure consistent differentiator,” said Mike Henning, manager performance, transaction volume increased of enterprise tools at Alltel. “CEM helps us over 400%. ensure our applications deliver world-class Today, more than 40 Alltel IT staff members performance for every customer and every and line of business managers rely on CEM transaction.” data for a variety of key tasks. g