Customer Overview: Home improvement retailer serving approximately 17 million customer transactions a week across 1,700 stores throughout North America.

Industry: Retail

The Problem: Nothing is more important in retail than the customer experience. Network uptime and solid store network performance are key components of the customer experience. Customers get frustrated if transactions are halted, or even slow. The home improvement retailer minimized the risk of transaction processing issues with cellular connectivity as a backup to primary circuits at each store. But, cellular came with inherent challenges in their store environment.

Construction Impact on Cellular Performance:  Each retail store is large and constructed out of materials unsuitable for solidly performing signals between cellular radios (racked inside the building) and nearby cell towers.

Location Impact on Cellular Performance: Each retail store is located in a heavily populated area near high-traffic roads. This guaranteed that competing cellular signals would create a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) due to nearby heavy traffic.

Internally Competing Signals: Each store's IT infrastructure also consists of WIFI and multiple radios used by personnel for instore communication. This injected additional radio noise into the environment, hurting the performance of the critical backup cellular connectivity.

Our Solution: The home improvement retailer partnered with us to leverage our network design, deployment and managed services. Through our managed services we enabled them to report on cellular performance, notify support personnel when cellular health metrics degraded, and provide intel to technicians for quick issue remediation. We further personalized the solution through the integration of our platform with the retailer's service desk to enable seamless, real-time issue notification directly into their existing service management software.

Additionally, we delivered high cellular data usage notifications and reporting, which the retailer used for awareness and proactive management of cellular usage, and the ability to act on network resource abuse.

The Results: Our solution, implemented across all retail stores within three weeks, provided the retailer:

• Reduced MTTR
  
• Reduction in average site downtime
  
• Elimination of unnecessary high data plan consumption and charges
  
• Unified alerting and ticket workflows
• Single source of truth for cellular performance alerting, reporting, and remediation