PETRONAS Dagangan Berhad Reduces Problem Resolution to Mere Minutes

Customer Profile

Petroliam Nasional Berhad (PETRONAS) is Malaysia’s fully integrated oil and gas multinational and is ranked among the largest corporations in the Fortune Global 500. Their partly owned PETRONAS Dagangan Berhad business subsidiary is involved in the distribution and sale of finished petroleum products and operations of service stations for the Malaysian market.

PETRONAS provides onshore and offshore gas and petroleum exploration primarily in Malaysia. It has grown to be Malaysia’s largest petroleum retail network, marketing products to consumers in more than 1,000 PETRONAS stations and 725 Kedai Mesra convenience stores.

In addition to petroleum products, their one-stop convenience centres offer dining, shopping, banking, car spa, and other services.

The Challenge

PETRONAS understands that customer satisfaction is critical to sustaining their market leadership, and they are implementing technology to ensure proactive detection of customer impacting service degradation, allowing them to rectify any situations prior to negatively impacting customers.

For PETRONAS, information technology (IT) services are key to providing excellent customer service. From processing credit cards through point-of-sale (POS) terminals to ensuring stocking orders can be made in convenience stores, any degradation can impact customer experience, and customers might choose to take their business elsewhere as a result. In addition to customers visiting petrol stations and convenience stores, many are enrolled in a customer loyalty program. In supporting this program, PETRONAS runs a call center for loyalty members, and the IT team is tasked with ensuring call centre technologies are available and performing well to provide high-quality service.

Prior to acquiring a proactive monitoring solution for real-time end-to-end monitoring of applications, hosts, and network services, PETRONAS was unable to detect and correct IT service degradations – leaving issues as they would occur to impact their valued customers.

With more than 1,000 remote locations and applications, such as POS logistics applications, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and others interfacing to the central data centres over the telco network, it became even more challenging to pinpoint disruptions at the remote locations, over the telco network, or in one of the central data centres. It was important for PETRONAS to implement a solution with visibility to handle the overall environment in order to reduce mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) when problems were detected.

Solution in Action

PETRONAS chose NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform for its ability to leverage smart data generated by its patented Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology to quickly identify and pinpoint the root cause of service problems. In this implementation, the solution is deployed in the central data centres, monitoring all packets into and out of the data centres, including POS, CRM, logistics, and other application traffic. Alarms are triggered to provide early warning when services first start to degrade. The IT staff looks to the Service Dashboard for details, including latency, errors, success/failure, etc. for the affected location. With contextual drill-downs from the dashboard to views of session details and/or specialized service monitors with key performance indicators, the team can quickly determine the root cause of problems, allowing them to be addressed before negatively impacting customers.

PETRONAS also deployed nGenius packet flow switch appliances at each data centre to optimize traffic, delivering it to required backend systems as well as to the InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliance, where bi-directional traffic is analyzed with ASI, creating smart data utilized by the nGeniusONE platform.

The Results

The NETSCOUT® solution has allowed PETRONAS to address performance problems prior to customer impact by quickly detecting and troubleshooting them when they first start. Finger-pointing is eliminated between the network, server, and applications groups with detailed smart data to pinpoint the root cause and provides the necessary evidence. In addition, where a problem exists in the telco network, with a payment gateway, or other 3rd party component of the service, PETRONAS has evidence to help the 3rd party solve the problem quickly.

Customer interactions at petrol stations and convenience stores have been improved, where previous issues could take 1-to-2 hours to detect and solve. This has been reduced to minutes and takes place without anyone needing to report a problem. In the loyalty rewards call centre, intermittent delays are no longer an issue, as the nGeniusONE solution proactively detects and allows IT to correct problems that were nearly impossible to track down previously. Customer service representatives are now able to consistently access customer accounts to redeem reward points and answer questions about the specific customer’s account.

With NETSCOUT, PETRONAS is able to provide the first-class customer service they strive for.