Jazz

Growing fast, building trust

In addition to building innovative technology, JazzCash must also build trust with its customers. Any interruptions or delays to services can be highly damaging to the customer — and the JazzCash brand. “If you are a rickshaw driver taking out a small loan in the morning to pay for fuel and then paying it back in the evening, you can’t afford a break in service,” says Qazi. 

While the business was growing fast, the team experienced unforeseen interruptions to JazzCash services that impacted the customer experience and revenues. “At peak times we can be handling more than a million transactions per hour. Even a temporary interruption can have significant consequences on customer experiences and our bottom line,” explains Beenish Wajih, Head of the Networks Operations Center (NOC) for Jazz.

“At Jazz, we are customer obsessed and steadfast in our commitment to continuous improvement. So, in addition to improving availability, we wanted to monitor the customer experience and introduce proactive reporting to minimize service disruption,” says Wajih. 

Qazi and Wajih were convinced that the answer lay in the deployment of a more integrated, accurate application and infrastructure observability solution. “Running any operation, especially technology, requires wide ranging and detailed visibility of our entire stack,” says Qazi. “We needed a consistent platform that would enable different teams to collaborate on identifying and fixing the root cause of a problem quickly.”

Supporting business growth

The ability to correlate information means that Wajih and her team can quickly understand the relationships and dependencies between different components and events within the JazzCash stack. “With AppDynamics we can identify patterns, trends, and anomalies that may not be apparent when looking at individual data points,” she says. “So, we can immediately pinpoint an issue that is restricting performance rather than wading through different areas of our infrastructure.” 

In addition to monitoring databases, networks, and applications, JazzCash uses AppDynamics to track end-user journeys. By sampling roughly one million customers, it can spot opportunities for new business cases and better customer experiences. This information is passed on to the marketing or customer care teams to help them develop new offers and promotions.  

“Financial inclusion is more than just replicating existing services on a mobile device. We need to be innovating constantly to keep up with the needs of our audience. It’s inspiring to get their feedback and hear how they are using technology to boost the prospects of their families and businesses,” says Wajih. 

Benefits

One version of the truth, many business advantages

Unified visibility improves collaboration among the JazzCash teams working to deliver the best customer experience. “AppDynamics gives us one version of the truth that is shared by multiple teams. Everyone feels as if they are working towards the same goal,” says Wajih.

Another critical improvement is the stability of the JazzCash app. “In the time that we’ve been using AppDynamics, we haven’t had a single glitch,” says Qazi. “I’ve worked with a lot of observability systems over the years and when it comes to reliability and ease of use, AppDynamics is the best I have experienced.”  

Above all, the data gathered by AppDynamics enables JazzCash to pinpoint and then fix problems much faster than before, virtually eliminating downtime “AppDynamics has significantly reduced the time spent on issue identification and reporting by providing actionable insights that enable backend teams to resolve issues fast,” says Wajih.