MultiChoice

Customer experiences with a clear vision

Customer experience is a key driver for MultiChoice, which is laser-focused on eliminating friction points from its customer journeys and making its digital and self-service channels faster and more reliable. 

Van Aswegen joined MultiChoice in 2018 to help fulfill this mission, and her team’s first action was to develop a granular view of MultiChoice’s application performance at a business transaction level. Without in-depth visibility into applications, the ability to validate performance changes to its IT environment and the associated improvements of its customer experience would be exponentially more challenging.

“We set out to transform the way we serve customers. That meant bringing in a solution that would reveal where we stood, allow us to set clear metrics for where we want to go, and make us agile enough to improve our performance quickly,” says Van Aswegen. 

MultiChoice was intent on optimizing its mobile app, a key channel for customers who use their mobile phones for a range of self-service engagements. The ability to track customers from the moment they sign up for MultiChoice, through package selection, monthly payments, and day-to-day content preferences is central to understanding their needs and optimizing self-service journeys.

With AppDynamics, MultiChoice gained a detailed view of application performance across its mobile app, web, and other digital services. Van Aswegen and her team can now monitor the performance of key customer services in granular detail, giving them new insights to improve and enhance the end-to-end digital experience. 

For instance, MultiChoice uses AppDynamics to monitor every transaction in its self-service and payments application. If a process slows to below acceptable thresholds, the issue is immediately brought to the team’s attention and swiftly investigated. Speed and reliability are crucial to MultiChoice’s self-service application, which both web and mobile customers use for a variety of convenient interactions.

“If our self-service applications don’t work, it has significant customer impact. If they’re working too slowly, we risk losing customers’ trust,” says Van Aswegen. “AppDynamics has made us more proactive in managing these applications, cutting our issue response and resolution time substantially.”

The puzzle pieces take shape

MultiChoice has made significant enhancements and optimizations throughout the system landscape, all driven by deeper and more extensive insight into its application performance. AppDynamics provides the organization with data rich dashboards, giving a real-time view of how services are running, where performance issues might arise and how customers are engaging with its digital channels. 

“Four years ago, we didn’t have the data we needed. With AppDynamics, we now have the relevant data that we can analyze in order to address performance issues across the customer journey,” says Van Aswegen.

By proactive monitoring of its core applications, MultiChoice has improved customer experience across several channels. The performance and reliability of certain core services has increased tenfold in some cases. 

“Managing business applications without AppDynamics is like starting a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle from scratch, with all the pieces laying around on the floor, it’s impossible to find the one you’re looking for, or know which pieces are missing,” says Van Aswegen. “The visibility we’ve gained into each piece of our application puzzle has been of exponential value, and the best part is that we can pay that forward to customers.”

A winning team

The partnership between MultiChoice and AppDynamics will grow as the business continues to enhance the monitoring and performance of its core services. MultiChoice’s Enterprise Business Solutions COO, Craig Coetzer, highlighted the importance and purpose of the AppDynamics team, as well as optimizing the underlying investment in the AppDynamics toolset, as the catalyst to driving out proactive application performance management and system performance optimization across all mission critical services. 

Leaders across the technology and engineering teams at MultiChoice see AppDynamics as an invaluable early warning system, and their teams are proactively catching many of these performance issues before Van Aswegen’s dedicated resources even get to them, a shift she is more than happy to see. 

“The level of empowerment and accountability we achieved with AppDynamics is the reason we were able to make more improvements to our customer experience in the past year than we had in the previous three,” she says. “Whenever you think it has revealed everything about your business, you learn something new.” 

“The true beauty of AppDynamics is that when a performance issue arises, we can actually find the ‘needle in the haystack,’” she adds. “We know what’s causing a problem and can proactively fix it. This translates to better, more reliable services for our customers. And that positive experience is why customers choose MultiChoice again and again.”