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Based in Little Rock, Arkansas, Alltel owns and operates the nation’s largest wireless network with nearly 12 million customers in 35 states.

Alltel owns a sophisticated enterprise computing environment that delivers wireless services to nearly 12 million telecommunications subscribers. The Enterprise Tools Group is responsible for monitoring Alltel’s business applications and ensuring the availability and performance of next-generation telecommunications services.

Since 2005, Alltel has relied on CA Wily Introscope® to provide low-overhead, 24x7 monitoring for its Java-based mission-critical applications. In 2006, Alltel selected CA Wily Customer Experience Manager (CA Wily CEM) to deliver customer-centric visibility into the performance of high-value Web applications like its Siebel-based My Circle service.

My Circle is a calling plan that enables Alltel customers to select up to 10 numbers with unlimited minutes to talk with those 10 numbers (regardless of the carrier network they belong to). Alltel customers can change their numbers daily via B2C or B2B Web applications. To ensure customer satisfaction, Alltel relied on CA Wily CEM in development and production to provide visibility into the customer experience with My Circle, which enabled IT staff and line of business managers to identify and eliminate performance problems when they occurred.

With zero system overhead, CA Wily CEM identifies defective transactions and aggregates the users experiencing that problem into a single incident. The solution then prioritizes incidents based on business impact and automatically triggers evidence collection to help IT staff eliminate the root cause of the problem.

Subscribers who qualify for My Circle make hundreds of thousands of updates to their Siebel-based accounts every month, and My Circle applications consistently meet service level agreements (SLAs) for uptime and availability. To ensure optimal application performance, Alltel’s Enterprise Tools team uses CA Wily CEM to analyze historical customer transaction data. During one review, the team determined that thousands of customers were receiving an error message when updating their My Circle numbers, yet they were not reporting the error to customer service.

After reviewing the data captured by CA Wily CEM, Alltel’s team identified the root-cause of the defective transactions: A logic error was causing customers to receive an incorrect error response when updating My Circle numbers. In more than 50 percent of these transactions, the My Circle application successfully updated the customer account, but still generated an error message to the user, which resulted in customers attempting to update their My Circle accounts multiple times.

According to Mike Henning, Manager of Enterprise Tools at Alltel, “Installing CA Wily CEM was like turning on a flashlight in a dark room. It illuminated problems we could never see before. Plugging it in was fast, and during our initial POC we immediately began recording valuable data about customer interactions with our Siebel applications.”

Armed with this information, Alltel’s IT staff implemented a programming change that immediately eliminated the incorrect response from the Siebel application.

Based on the success with My Circle, Alltel expanded its CA Wily CEM deployment to monitor other mission-critical, customer-facing Web applications, as well as business-to-business applications that carry a low volume of high-dollar value transactions. Overall, CA Wily CEM now monitors and records more than half a million Siebel transactions per day with zero system overhead.

In the first six months of use, CA Wily CEM monitored and recorded more than 53 million direct customer transactions and an additional 18 million transactions to provide Alltel’s Enterprise Tools group with a complete historical record for SLA and continuous improvement reporting.

Another example of continuous improvement reporting occurred after an Alltel business analyst reviewed CA Wily CEM data for an application that allowed resellers to add a new line of wireless service to existing customer accounts. This application was processing transactions at a far lower rate than the projected transaction volume.

An investigation by Alltel’s IT staff showed that an error in the application was disabling the ‘add new line of service’ button for some customers. After modifying the application to ensure consistent performance, transaction volume increased more than 400 percent.

Today, more than 40 IT staff and line of business managers at Alltel review data from CA Wily CEM for different purposes. IT staff use CA Wily CEM to monitor SLAs and troubleshoot specific customer experience problems with Web applications, while business managers rely on it to deliver high-level visibility into the business impact of Web applications and to understand user trends or the success of new promotions.

The zero overhead customer experience monitoring through CA Wily CEM enabled Alltel to improve customer satisfaction by identifying and eliminating hard-to-find application problems. With historical data from transactions at the individual user or group level, Alltel can now quickly research and resolve application problems to ensure optimal performance. Real results include:

• Improved transaction volume by over 400 percent per month for a key revenue-generating Web application after analyzing performance data collected by CA Wily CEM.
• Identified and eliminated the cause of thousands of defective My Circle transactions occurring every day.
• Successfully monitored and recorded 71 million transactions over six months for historical analysis and trend reporting.

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