Humanitarian Organization Reduces Application Slowdowns by 94%

Every year, more than 500,000 volunteer employees from this humanitarian organization help victims across the United States. As you might expect, they receive a sharp increase in phone calls during crises such as earthquakes, hurricanes, fires and other disasters that require relief efforts. Central to their ability to service the volume of calls, as well as to recruit and coordinate volunteers, is the organization’s automated telephone messaging system.

Slowdowns Disrupt Service

The organization experienced a significant number of slowdowns with its messaging system which disrupted the number of connections with the system, hampered its ability to service callers, and impacted telephone recruitment efforts.

“We receive a tremendous increase in the number of calls to the system during a crisis, which, if you’re not prepared, can tax your system and delay getting the right resources to the right location at the right time,” said the IT manager.

The IT department received the blame for these slowdowns, but they were unsure of the cause and lacked the proper tools – at that time – to identify the source of the problem.

Meanwhile, the messaging system continued to lag which made life difficult for employees and volunteers to manage calls.

Identifying Response Time Problems

IT staff asked TeamQuest to execute a performance analysis study on the messaging system and identify the root cause of response time issues. At that time, the IT team was working with 81 performance issues attributed to the automated telephone messaging system, affecting multiple locations throughout the United States.

While rooting out the performance issues, IT discovered high percentages of I/O wait during the analysis study, meaning the I/O devices were spending more time waiting and less time doing real work. This finding indicated a likely bottleneck with the I/O devices.

In the past, the IT team had made decisions on a combination of one part data and three parts gut feeling. “We weren’t collecting the data we needed to make the best business decisions,” said the IT manager. “It took us months of reacting to every single suggestion before we decided to slow down and employ an effective process. Working with TeamQuest, we were able to identify the real problem within weeks of initiating the study.”

TeamQuest Solves Bottlenecks

After finding and resolving the initial I/O bottleneck, the organization continued to whittle down the number of slowdown instances month by month until they were down to only five – a 94% reduction in slowdowns in four months’ time.

“Working with TeamQuest was pretty simple,” said the IT director. “They were very receptive, listened, and worked with us on every request we made to accommodate our specific situation.”