TELUS maximizes revenue during peak sales moments with Dynatrace

TELUS is one of Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, providing a wide range of world class technology solutions to businesses and consumers. To drive its continued growth, TELUS underwent a transformation to modernize its IT operating model. It embraced a new, more dynamic application architecture and migrated services from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. This transformation was underpinned by an observability strategy that enabled a more proactive approach to managing customer experiences.

While this approach improved the performance and resilience of its applications, TELUS saw an opportunity to extend its observability-driven insights across the business. The company has a complex sales ecosystem, consisting of systems used by internal teams and third-party retail partners. TELUS wanted to extend its use of observability data to visualize what customers were experiencing across any sales channel in real time. This is particularly important during sales events like Black Friday, when customers will opt to shop elsewhere if the experience isn’t perfect.

To improve visibility across its sales ecosystem, TELUS used Dynatrace to create custom visualizations and dashboards that leveraged real user monitoring (RUM) metrics. Powered by Grail, the dashboards provided developer, sales, and management teams with clear insights into the in-store and online shopping experience over Black Friday. This empowered teams to take more ownership of how their applications were performing and resolve issues before they impacted the customer, preventing lost sales during the crucial shopping weekend.

“Black Friday 2024 was a huge tipping point for us,” said Dana Harrison, Staff Site Reliability Engineer at TELUS. “With insights from Dynatrace, we shifted from a reactive to a proactive way of monitoring our systems. Until then, we hadn’t been able to connect every customer touch point and truly understand what was happening throughout their journey. For the first time, we were able to visualize across the whole stack and every sales channel in real time. The result is more resilient serves and a better experience for customers during critical moments like Black Friday.”

• Greater collaboration: The visibility from Dynatrace dashboards created a cultural shift at TELUS. During Black Friday, teams across the business started sharing links to Dynatrace’s analysis to solve problems as they arose. This cross-team collaboration meant issues were resolved faster, with in-store sales representatives thanking the IT team for helping them succeed during the crucial sales period.

• Empowering data-driven decisions: The insights from Dynatrace have been used beyond technical teams to achieve business level goals. For instance, executives can gain a view into how specific products are performing to make more informed decisions about business priorities and understand their direct impact on revenue.

• Faster innovation: Technologies from Dynatrace, such as Live Debugger, are helping TELUS deploy software at speed and scale. Previously, developers couldn’t easily understand the impact of code changes or test releases in pre-production. With Live Debugger, TELUS has increased visibility and can implement automatic checks to improve performance. TELUS estimates that Live Debugger reduces developers’ manual efforts by up to 96%—what used to take forty-five minutes now takes two.

• Improved security: TELUS is using the Dynatrace Application Security module to further improve the quality of its releases by spotting vulnerabilities before production. The company has seen a 30% reduction in its overall open vulnerability count, and a 40% decrease in distinct open vulnerabilities by package version. This feedback loop has enabled better collaboration between developers, security, and operations teams as Dynatrace helps them prioritize vulnerabilities based on business risk.

“For TELUS, Dynatrace makes everything possible,” continued Harrison. “We now have far greater visibility and deeper insights into our IT environment and customer journey—uncovering aspects we previously didn’t even realize existed. The level of analysis that Dynatrace shares with us is eye opening. Dynatrace has pulled back the curtain so that we are now looking at and understanding everything in our ecosystem.”