With PagerDuty, ZENCONNECT routinely achieves alarm resolution in less than an hour, providing close-to-perfect customer service

Any way you look at it, 2015 was a banner year for ZENCONNECT. The French network-solutions provider saw turnover (also known as total revenues) increase by 64% last year as they made the leap from niche-market to enterprise-level service provider. As they made this leap, however, they were not without early growing pains. ZENCONNECT was building rapidly on a homegrown system, in which the main support phone number rerouted to different technician’s cells throughout the week. Not only did this result in a number of misdirected issues, but only tier 1 alerts got the attention they needed. Without a full view of their infrastructure, ZENCONNECT’s engineer’s were constantly playing catch up.

Offering remote network management and outsourcing, event WiFi and VPN services, and network-infrastructure project management, ZENCONNECT insists on providing flexible, crystal-clear, proactive solutions to SMEs and large firms alike. As the company sought to scale its IT infrastructure to keep pace with growth, PagerDuty stood out as offering the flexibility, data-driven clarity, and proactive approach they needed to succeed. And when ZENCONNECT partnered with PagerDuty, they started succeeding in a very big way.

Flexibility to Meet End-Users Needs

The first and most obvious benefit ZENCONNECT has seen with PagerDuty is that technician’s no longer have to waste time redirecting alerts not meant for them. Using PhoneDuty, a PagerDuty/Twilio integration hosted on Heroku, ZENCONNECT can automatically route clients’ calls to the proper on-call technician. Not only does this mean seamless customer service for ZENCONNECT’s clients, it means less stress for technicians trying to recharge and greater efficiency for those on call.

And when they are on call, ZENCONNECT’s technicians use PagerDuty’s rich alerting to customize the way they are notified. This helps cut down on missed issues by routing them to multiple devices if necessary. Plus, urgency-based features make it possible to cut through the noise and focus of the most critical incidents first. With this functionality in place, says CTO Yohann Lecornet, ZENCONNECT has eliminated alert fatigue and built the blazing speed that can only be achieved in a truly flexible alerting environment:

“With PagerDuty we’ve achieved response times we could only dream of before. Our agents now average 33 seconds before picking up a ticket and only 2.6 hours before responding with a solution.”

System-Wide Visibility

Not only does PagerDuty provide flexibility and speed from incident to incident, but that increase in efficiency means that ZENCONNECT’s engineers can get out of the weeds and get a big-picture view of their incident-response infrastructure. Which, you have to admit, is pretty crucial when you’re in the business of responding to network infrastructure incidents.

For starters, PagerDuty’s dashboard allows ZENCONNECT to centralize, classify, and enrich events from all of its monitoring platforms. From there, teams can bundle actionable events to identify and resolve critical issues while providing contextual insights, including graphs, images, and runbook links, right in the incident details. The baseline clarity this event grouping and enrichment provides is ZENCONNECT’s first step in establishing fine-tuned triage protocols and cutting down on response time.

From there, PagerDuty’s analytics lets ZENCONNECT visualize and analyze everything from system-wide efficiency down to individual performance. The big picture allows ZENCONNECT to identify and mitigate SLA hotspots while tracking MTTR trends so they can optimize operational protocols. The granular view allows them to evaluate agility and productivity by team and individual. These analytics make it possible to load-balance work streams and recognize team heros, building morale and efficiency simultaneously. The results, says Lecornet, are indisputable:

“With PagerDuty, we have managed over 5,000 alarms with a loss of 0%. We just don’t miss anything anymore.”

Proactive Incident Management

Having established a flexible alerting environment backed by crystal-clear analytics, ZENCONNECT is done playing catch up. Now they’re ahead of the game, confident in their ability to provide proactive solutions to their clients’ needs because PagerDuty is a proactive solution to their own. ZENCONNECT now routinely achieves alarm resolution in less an hour, and over three-quarters of their tickets can be resolved with a single action. As with any operations metric, says Lecornet, it’s less about what their technicians see and more about what their customers don’t see:

“Our customer experience is close to perfect now. We are preventing almost all issues before they affect our clients. PagerDuty has been essential to this achievement.”