Easy-to-gather insights help focus development and testing resources
Polycom may be best known for its ubiquitous triangle conference phones, but the telecommunications leader also delivers a vast array of video and content solutions to help its more than 400,000 customers collaborate effectively.
The Challenge
It’s hard to know where to concentrate your testing if you don’t know the most common setups customers use. With Keen, we can see what software and hardware versions are in the field, and how prevalent a particular version is. That helps us focus our testing for the next release.
Polycom was eager to make better use of data to help focus resources and improve customer experience. With 50 million devices, connected through a highly customizable platform, Polycom’s requirements echoed those of many hardware and IoT businesses:
- Understanding which configurations, features, and software versions customers used most, in order to focus testing efforts.
- Being able to spot brewing problems with customers’ implementations.
- Gathering data in a manner that respects customers’ privacy—and doesn’t overwhelm internal systems.
- Performance monitoring designed specifically for device-driven business products.
Except for Keen, the services we researched were mostly targeted at web traffic and other use cases that didn’t suit our model. With Keen, we have the flexibility to query just the data we need, all in one place.
The Solution
Our products are core systems on customer networks, so we couldn’t stream everything that happened—both for privacy reasons and the sheer volume of data.
The extreme flexibility of Keen’s tools was the key that unlocked Polycom’s data treasure chest.
- Deciding to gather memory usage data, Polycom achieved unexpected foresight into memory leaks and other issues in the field, making it possible to address fail points before they resulted in issues with the system.
- Polycom was able to identify popular configurations, then boost testing in those areas. By identifying features its customers were using most, Polycom was able to reallocate development resources from unpopular to popular features.
- Having gained answers to their initial questions, Polycom continues to adapt Keen tools to bring efficiency and clarity to additional parts of the business.
With Keen, we don’t need to have a dedicated analyst for our data. The toolset Keen provides allows anyone on our team to go in, play with the data, and easily share queries with others.
The Impact
Today, Polycom is able to easily access and utilize data to drive improvements in internal operations, customer satisfaction, and, by extension, revenue.
- More efficient development and testing has yielded better performing products.
- Proactively addressing problematic customer configurations has resulted in fewer system outages.
- More scheduled—rather than moment-of-crisis—support tickets has lowered overtime costs for support services.
- These improvements have led to happier customers and a stronger business.
With Keen, we’re able to spot some cases of memory leaks in the field. Finding these problems before they’re critical helps decrease outages, which keeps customers happy. We’re also able to schedule fixes, instead of having to react immediately to an unplanned outage.
