TELUS drives customer experience excellence with enterprise-wide observability from Dynatrace

TELUS is a leading communications company with a longstanding commitment to putting its customers first through continuous innovation. This strategy fuels every aspect of its business, which has made it a leader in customer service excellence. To maintain this position, TELUS implemented an enterprise-wide cloud and DevOps strategy, which is continuing to evolve as its teams migrate more services away from on-premises infrastructure to enable greater agility and faster innovation.

As its journey to the cloud gained momentum, TELUS built up an increasingly complex hybrid technology stack. Within this environment, even the simplest digital transaction, such as purchasing a new mobile device, came to rely on hundreds of services, operated by up to 25 different teams. These teams relied on multiple tools to monitor the performance of applications and infrastructure, making it time-consuming to identify any impact on the customer experience.

TELUS wanted to support its enterprise-wide cloud and DevOps strategy with a unified approach to observability, to enable end-to-end traceability across the entire customer journey from a single platform. To support this, it needed a solution that could provide visibility from front-end customer-facing workloads into the back-end on-premises infrastructure and cloud platforms that support them.

“Reliability is a key driver for how customers feel when they're on our site, which focuses us on what we can do to make their experience better,” said Kulvir Gahunia, Director of the Site Reliability Office, TELUS. “We need to identify what we can do to engage customers better, and how we can enable our team to deliver that type of outcome. That means our developers need to see what customers might experience if they change a piece of code. However, the complexity of our environment makes it very difficult to provide that visibility. We have services upon services, and the transaction chain is very long. Dynatrace is the platform of choice to help us pick that complexity apart.”

• Expedited journey to the cloud: With Dynatrace, TELUS has been able to accelerate its transition to the cloud, by maintaining end-to-end traceability across its hybrid technology stack. Now, TELUS’ developers receive instant feedback on the impact that any changes they make have on the customer experience and business outcomes and can respond quickly if problems arise. As a result, TELUS has reduced mean time to resolution by 45% if issues occur in customer journeys.
• Continuous improvement: TELUS has embedded Dynatrace and site reliability engineering principles into its entire development workflow to support shift left practices. This means that developers can access insights that they can use to improve the performance and functionality of their code, workflows, and processes during the early stages of delivery, helping to drive faster innovation and create better customer experiences.
• Secure innovation: Dynatrace’s Application Security capabilities are enabling a shift towards DevSecOps processes amongst TELUS’ teams. This is arming developers with the insights they need to identify, prioritize, and address security flaws quickly to keep the organization and its customers safe, whilst making the most effective use of their time.
• Driving operational efficiency: By moving to an enterprise-wide observability strategy with Dynatrace, TELUS has been able to remove multiple disparate monitoring tools and create a shared source of insights that all teams can use. In addition to the cost savings that come with reduced tooling, Dynatrace’s automation has also led to a 30% reduction in onboarding time. Its support for monitoring as code approaches enabled TELUS’ teams to reduce the time it would have taken to deploy an end-to-end observability solution from 600 minutes to just 20.

“Dynatrace helps us understand the journey, improve our code, and ensure the customer is satisfied. Ultimately, that's what we're in the business of,” continued Gahunia. “Dynatrace shines a light on the whole process, and with all the new features that are being released consistently, the sky's the limit on how far we can go and how much it will be able to tell us in the future. With Dynatrace, we have the ability to involve the business in what we see from a developer and IT perspective, so it's a collaborative effort on where to improve, because they can see the same data we're seeing. We've moved from being reactive to problems to proactively resolving them. This has had a tremendous impact on our customer experience.”