Royal Caribbean Cruises Into a New Era

When it comes to website operations, Alex Oliva, manager of operations on Royal Caribbean's e-commerce team, says the ability to see everything has already paid big dividends. Oliva states: "Analytics and metrics are the stars for us. We had an issue with the business journey for customers in the United Kingdom, and we were able to validate the issue, then graph exactly when and why the problem started. These are complex scenarios with different symptoms, so being able to query exactly what we need to know is a big win."

The fact that Royal Caribbean had an appetite to truly understand the analytics piece of its network puzzle was music to the ears to longtime Cisco partner NTT, the global services provider on the project.

"We were pleased that Royal Caribbean paid such close attention to the analytics piece," says Joe Maissel, practise director at NTT. "When they were able to see exactly what was happening with a view into critical business functionality, it provided real value to them."

The results: a cultural shift

While Cisco FSO has helped McElroy enhance the experience for customers, the results of the implementation have been equally beneficial for her team. She says, "Our culture has changed. We went from being a reactive type of organisation to a proactive, preventive organisation."

McElroy adds: "We used to work off spreadsheets and do an operational checkpoint, and each team would say by their gut how they felt the system was doing. Now, we not only know the health of our systems, but we also have visibility into business transactions, enabling us to build trend analysis on retention rates and the booking funnel. With Cisco solutions, we're data driven."

FSO improves team productivity

"Cisco Full-Stack Observability has helped improve our developers' productivity at Royal Caribbean almost 100 percent," says McElroy. "In this day and age where developers are responsible for not only developing the solution, but also supporting the solution, they still just want to spend their time developing. Now, they've integrated monitoring into the development cycle, so they know how the system is going to perform before it goes live. When we do go live, they get to spend more time developing and less time supporting a broken system."

McElroy adds, "Since the implementation of the Cisco AppDynamics platform, we've reduced our mean time to resolution (MTTR) by 50 percent. We've also decreased the number of critical incidents, which means increased uptime. And, as everyone knows, downtime equals lost revenue."

The Royal Caribbean and Cisco collaboration

McElroy is not only pleased with the Cisco FSO solution, but she also says she values how the collaboration with NTT and Cisco helped Royal Caribbean improve the guest experience for its customers.

"We focused together on our challenges and on the solutions that would mean positive changes for our customers. Because of this shared commitment, I believe in the solution we implemented, but most importantly, I believe in our partnership."

Maissel agrees, saying, "Through our deployment and managed services with Cisco Full-Stack Observability, our goal is to empower our customers to be successful with the investments they've made. It's been rewarding helping Royal Caribbean get to where they are and partnering with them on where they want to go."