Staci Americas Resolves Customer API Issues Faster with Moesif

Overview

With 15 centers across the United States, Staci Americas processes more than 20 million orders/year. Customers place orders using different connectors such as CSV, portal entry, Shopify, and APIs. Staci Americas ingests the orders, normalizes, and then routes them to an appropriate facility, following whatever rules the customers specify. Once the orders reach a distribution center, Staci Americas dispatches the packages.

At the top level, Staci Americas has a conglomerated database where they sync all the data from the facility databases. This gives them a single 360° view, from which they can identify what's coming, what's going, and who's doing what.

What was I doing before Moesif? Suffering. I needed help and I needed it badly. Luckily, it wasn't a long process to go from knowing what I needed, to finding a solution and getting it implemented. The getting-started process with Moesif was very smooth.

Carla Tillman, Senior Developer

Challenge

Staci Americas' currently reducing the number of connectors and going straight API as much as possible. By sunsetting existing connectors like Shopify, the traffic over their API has skyrocketed. Not only that, the company has quadrupled their absolute order volume over the last three years. As they've asked everyone to go through their APIs, they've seen a commensurate increase in erroneous order submissions. Although they had their 360°-degree view, with the large increase in API usage, they needed a way to streamline how orders could be retrieved and analyzed.

Troubleshooting Customer Issues

Staci Americas' biggest and most painful problem stemmed from them not Staci Americas' biggest pain point stemmed from infrastructure gaps around data capture and organization. Customers, many of whom spend millions of dollars a year with them, were unable to backtrack, making it difficult to fix disparities in the data.

Staci Americas could see what was being sent to them in JSON format and, if it was a successful post submission, could identify the data. But, in the cases of unsuccessful submissions, Staci Americas didn't have a way to identify who or what was at fault.

A customer might say that they had sent it, but all Staci Americas saw was that it was unsuccessful. To Staci Americas, the customer might not have sent it at all, sent it to Staci Americas' sandbox, or sent it and Staci Americas rejected it. Staci Americas wanted a surefire way to tell the customer what the issue was.

When a disparity arose, they needed a way to analyze what happened: “Many times we had to look back and say 'Okay. Yes, you did send us the data, but I also see that we rejected it and suggested that you fix it.' or 'You've already been informed of the unsuccessful submission', or 'We cannot find a record of you sending it'”

Moesif has definitely sped up the process and the pain of troubleshooting any missed data.

Carla Tillman, Senior Developer

Solution

Carla was actively researching various companies for monitoring software, observability, and lighter API monitoring. She examined solutions around Kubernetes and about ten others. But what won her over about Moesif was our ease of installation & implementation, our quick-start capability, and the ability to see and find the exact information she needed.

Rapid Complaint Resolution

When Moesif identifies that Staci Americas did indeed receive the order, then Carla knows there's a problem on the other side. She then goes outside her systems and reverse engineer what's happened to further investigate the issue.

When I get a customer complaint now, I simply go into Moesif and check that I have a record of it being sent and see if the response resulted in a success or failure message. In those unfortunate situations where I find an error it's now quickly resolved. Moesif has definitely sped up the process and the pain of troubleshooting any missed data.

Carla Tillman, Senior Developer

Making Customers Successful

Carla's also now able to troubleshoot customers' syntax using Moesif. She's had instances where clients have said they weren't getting submission confirmations. By using Moesif she can quickly locate the data and, by returning the submission to the customer, they'll use it to identify the problem on their side.

I'm able to use Moesif to say to our customers 'I can see your calling pattern.' I can then explore how the customer is using their <gets>. We're able to see if the customer has any missing parameters or information. Moesif's been a very handy tool for research.

Carla Tillman, Senior Developer

Speeding Customer Onboarding

By monitoring Moesif's volume by endpoint metrics, Staci Americas is able to rapidly identify spikes coming from specific customers and help them fix the issue. This most often occurs during new user onboarding, where they might be using the API incorrectly.

Recently I was able to identify large spikes from specific endpoints, drill into the data and help guide new users in the very earliest stages of their onboarding. The metrics: volume by endpoint, top five users and top 10 users, all come together to allow me to proactively manage my API base.

Carla Tillman, Senior Developer

Reliably Scaling

At the same time as Staci Americas has significantly increased their API usage, they've also got faster and better at serving up data for their clients. They've achieved this by using Moesif to give them metrics on latency and duration to really fine-tune their queries and examine how they're implementing some functions.

One of my personalized metrics shows me everything that's taking over 60 seconds. Thanks to Moesif, we found a call that was consistently timing out, or going to the edge of a timeout, and really hurting overall system performance. We fixed that function and it now returns in less than a second. Moesif's really helped us reimagine the way we do things.

Carla Tillman, Senior Developer

Summary

For more information on how Moesif can help you make your customers successful, reduce your churn and improve your customer satisfaction check out our Customer Success capability today.

Moesif is my go to, my number one tool, for troubleshooting problems. I'll check my database first, but then switch over to Moesif pretty quickly. With Moesif you'll get back what you put into it. All of the hooks, bells and whistles have been added, you just have to take advantage of them.

Carla Tillman, Senior Developer