The service payoff Moving high volume stores to SD-WAN enabled Dunn- Edwards Paints to improve performance and reliability to support innovative apps that keep customers engaged and coming back for more, including hosted voice, and in-store PCs for customers to access online how-to videos. The business payoff SD-WAN boosted efficiency, replacing costly secondary T1s with broadband in some locations, while adding capacity/diversity where it hadn’t been affordable. “Now we can expand the training video to more stores,” said Pete Garcia, Manager of Infrastructure Services. “It’s the right technology at the right time.” It’s all about the customer experience A superior CX is central to Dunn-Edwards Paints’ success. Their customers – primarily professionals in painting, construction , architecture and design – come to tap the knowledge of their highly trained staff, and for differentiators like their proprietary Perfect Palette® system. “Our job is to make their job easier,” said Peter Girgis, VP, CIO, adding the network needs to help deliver on that promise. EarthLink SD-WAN Concierge helped them do just that, making implementation and management easy. “Doing it internally, I’m just not sure that can be done, even if we had 10 people,” said Pete Garcia, “the magic really happens on the EarthLink network.” CASE STUDY: DUNN-EDWARDS PAINTS A customer experience success story The retail paint industry is highly competitive, but as in many specialty categories, size doesn’t always rule the day. Oftentimes, the brand that stays closest to the customer is the one that wins. Such is the case of Dunn-Edwards Paints, the leading manufacturer and retailer of architectural and industrial coatings in the Southwest. Dunn-Edwards Paints attributes their success to delivering a superior customer experience (CX) fueled by a combination of better products and better people, with superior technology to support them both. Of course, their continued growth has created challenges, including increased traffic across their 129 store wide area network. To address growing bandwidth demand, they implemented EarthLink SD-WAN Concierge, enabling them to dramatically enhance performance and reliability without dramatically increasing cost or administrative overhead. It’s a great example of how SD-WAN can help take a true CX success story and make it even better. Specialty retailer & manufacturer adds EarthLink SD-WAN Concierge ™ to drive performance and take customer experience even higher
Transcript
The service payoffMoving high volume stores to SD-WAN enabled Dunn-Edwards Paints to improve performance and reliability to support innovative apps that keep customers engaged and coming back for more, including hosted voice, and in-store PCs for customers to access online how-to videos.
The business payoff SD-WAN boosted efficiency, replacing costly secondary T1s with broadband in some locations, while adding capacity/diversity where it hadn’t been affordable. “Now we can expand the training video to more stores,” said Pete Garcia, Manager of Infrastructure Services. “It’s the right technology at the right time.”
It’s all about the customer experience A superior CX is central to Dunn-Edwards Paints’ success. Their customers – primarily professionals in painting, construction , architecture and design – come to tap the knowledge of their highly trained staff, and for differentiators like their proprietary Perfect Palette® system. “Our job is to make their job easier,” said Peter Girgis, VP, CIO, adding the network needs to help deliver on that promise. EarthLink SD-WAN Concierge helped them do just that, making implementation and management easy. “Doing it internally, I’m just not sure that can be done, even if we had 10 people,” said Pete Garcia, “the magic really happens on the EarthLink network.”
CASE STUDY: DUNN-EDWARDS PAINTS
A customer experience success story The retail paint industry is highly competitive, but as in many specialty categories, size doesn’t always rule the day. Oftentimes, the brand that stays closest to the customer is the one that wins.
Such is the case of Dunn-Edwards Paints, the leading manufacturer and retailer of architectural and industrial coatings in the Southwest. Dunn-Edwards Paints attributes their success to delivering a superior customer experience (CX) fueled by a combination of better products and better people, with superior technology to support them both.
Of course, their continued growth has created challenges, including increased traffic across their 129 store wide area network. To address growing bandwidth demand, they implemented EarthLink SD-WAN Concierge, enabling them to dramatically enhance performance and reliability without dramatically increasing cost or administrative overhead. It’s a great example of how SD-WAN can help take a true CX success story and make it even better.
Specialty retailer & manufacturer adds EarthLink SD-WAN Concierge™ to drive performance and take customer experience even higher
Challenge Dunn-Edwards Paints counts on their network for a range of apps to deliver a superior CX. These include essential apps like hosted voice and POS, and new bandwidth intensive apps that let customers upload and test images with any of the 1,996 Perfect Palette® colors. The combination, Garcia said, was stretching their network’s limits. “The T1 was getting saturated; adding more just didn’t make sense.”
SolutionGarcia said they were interested as soon as EarthLink launched SD-WAN. “We wanted to support our in-store paint advisors, with customer focused apps like Adobe Creative Cloud, but up to that point, we couldn’t do it in a seamless way. SD-WAN empowered us to address this need.”
With their EarthLink Concierge, they replaced secondary T1s in high volume locations with broadband, and identified other stores where they could expand video-based training. Implementation was a breeze. “With the size of our team and workload, doing it internally, I’m just not sure it can be done. So this kind of thing is of great value.”
ResultsGarcia gives SD-WAN high marks for performance and reliability. “SD-WAN empowered us to add bandwidth to deliver any application our stores and users want,” he said. “We’ve gained visibility into network traffic and have been hitting very high performance numbers. And with redundant connectivity, we’ve experienced very high uptime levels with no interruptions.”
FutureThe company is optimistic about expanding on their use of SD-WAN. “We’ve learned a lot about the impact on stores and costs and it makes sense now,” Garcia said. “It will let us extend video training to more stores because it’s more affordable than adding T1s.”
CIO Girgis agreed, adding, “Our business leaders continually ask for more customer facing apps and employee training. Previously, there was no economical way to meet these requests. SD-WAN empowered us to add bandwidth to do it.”
SD-WAN has been very successful and we plan on growing it. I’d certainly recommend others do a pilot for their organization. You’ll find it will work for you, too.
About UsEarthLink is a leading network services provider dedicated to delivering great customer experiences in a cloud connected world. We help thousands of specialty retailers, restaurants, financial institutions, healthcare providers, professional service firms, local governments, and consumers securely establish critical connections in the cloud. More at www.earthlink.com, @earthlink, on LinkedIn and Google+.
