Background
Every year on the day after Thanksgiving—the day known as “Black Friday”—a major consumer electronics manufacturer would experience extremely high volume of contacts—store visits, phone calls, and Web site visits—and their systems were not able to process the increased volume, which resulted in lost revenue opportunities.
The Challenge
Due to the high volume of store visits, telephone calls and Web site visits that the client experienced on Black Friday, the systems that they had in place to monitor the traffic would fail year after year—this system failure led them to call IPI to resolve their issues.
The impact of the failure of the client’s Contact Management monitoring systems caused the client to be unable to track the traffic in real time and this lack of visibility prevented them from being able to adjust and redirect traffic to different paths that could handle the increased traffic—resulting in system failures that caused the client to incur lost revenue opportunities.
The Solution
IPI compiled a team to assess their current architecture and technology that they used for their monitoring platform. IPI found the following:
- Major fault points within the system
- Lack of standards
- Areas that were not scalable
- Old, unreliable hardware was in use
IPI devised a plan to mitigate the faults and redesign the architecture to handle the increased volume they received on Black Friday.
The Results
IPI experts independently went in and deployed the new technology for the client’s monitoring system. IPI consultants began working on the project in the latter part of September and worked through the Thanksgiving holiday to ensure that the client’s systems were operational on Black Friday.
For the first time in years, the client was able to go through Black Friday without their systems crashing, and was able to make decisions about routing traffic which resulted in their being able to handle their increased volume without any loss of revenue.
Additionally, the IPI team engineered a new platform that utilized the client’s server platform and allowed the retirement of their competitor’s server, which they had previously used.
