The weeks leading up to the holidays can be the busiest time of the year for the hospitality and retail industries. To keep up, businesses have added SaaS applications to help provide better guest experiences, streamline operations, and drive profit. Although SaaS offers several advantages, IT teams are now dependent on services outside of their control. Whether within the corporate network or not, when things go wrong, IT is held accountable. Users are reporting poor application performance yet existing monitoring tools don’t show any problems. So, what can you do?
Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) helps you deliver exceptional user experiences with the applications, networks, and devices employees rely on to keep customers happy and business flowing. Here are examples of how a business in the hospitality and retail industry can use ADEM to deliver exceptional user experiences.
ADEM monitors guest management systems and applications for a major hotel chain
“Once everyone got vaccinated, they were booking year-end activities creating a huge spike in our holiday bookings.” —IT manager at a major hotel chain
This global hotel franchise couldn’t afford technical disruptions impacting their ability to serve the influx of customers. Hotel IT teams use a variety of technology and applications to manage guest experiences and internal operations. Teams like front desk, back-office management, and payment processing, rely on SaaS applications to keep business running smoothly. The IT team had to rely on multiple monitoring solutions and manual methods to diagnose root causes and remediate problems when they arise. In need of a better solution, the hotel chain turned to Palo Alto Networks' ADEM solution to proactively monitor and manage critical system performance. For every hotel site, ADEM continuously checks if front-end systems can communicate to their respective applications hosted in the cloud and private data centers, and can proactively alert IT if there are performance issues. ADEM can also isolate the problem segment, reducing the time it takes IT to troubleshoot.
With SASE-native digital experience management solution fully integrated into the hotel chain's Prisma Access and Prisma SD-WAN environment, the IT team can now proactively monitor all the WAN paths connecting every hotel site to their applications and provide the best user experience possible, without installing additional software or hardware. They can also eliminate all the manual and inefficient monitoring methods they used before.
ADEM enables the hotel IT staff to detect anomalies and identify performance degradation issues automatically across all layers of the service delivery chain spanning from the user, through the devices, and to the applications. This automation reduces issue discovery from days to mere minutes, enabling fast remediation before negatively impacting the guest experience.
ADEM expands view across point-of-sale devices
Few things are as stressful and damaging for retailers as a point-of-sale (POS) system outage. Adding to the pressure, they seem to happen at the worst times. In 2017, US department store chain Macy’s suffered nationwide problems with its card machines on Black Friday, causing delays and disruption on its busiest day of the year.
A few years ago, a system refresh caused a POS blackout in Starbucks stores nationwide. With the complexity of some network-enabled POS systems, businesses have begun to understand how critical it is to monitor them in real-time. POS systems often encounter problems; however, many of them can be prevented or fixed faster with monitoring and gathering the right data at the right time.
Computer terminals and business applications tend to be top of mind when we talk about network and application performance. When a performance issue at a store location occurs, ADEM tells you in real-time where the issue lies. The proactive and synthetic monitoring capabilities ADEM provides help find trouble areas before they become even bigger problems that can impact customer experience.
Your holiday business performance shouldn’t be slowed down by poorly performing technology and insufficient end-user experience. Give your IT team the tools they need to keep things from negatively impacting your network and applications, or help get them up and running quickly when issues come up.
For more information on ADEM, check us out at www.paloaltonetworks.com/sase/adem.