As PagerDuty’s customer liaison on the Marketing team, the best part about my job is being able to hear directly from our customers about what their companies do and how PagerDuty has helped them become even more successful while strengthening the customer experience. Most recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Ed Groenescheij, the Operations Team Lead at Tyro Payments, a leading independent payments provider based in Australia.

Tyro processes over $10 billion AUD in transactions annually for more than 19,000 small to mid-sized businesses (merchants) across Australia. That’s a huge number to keep track of—plus Tyro also needs to ensure it continues to meet the commitment it has made to its customers, which is to help keep their businesses growing.

For example, imagine it’s the holiday season and you’re shopping around for last-minute gifts at your neighborhood retail store. There’s a long wait to check out, but you get in line anyway because the wait is expected for this time of year—and then the store owners inform you and the other customers that the credit card machines have suddenly gone down.

With that news, one of two things happen: Either the lines become longer because the checkout process has slowed down and people choose to wait, or people leave because they don’t have cash on hand, don’t have time to wait, or both. People leaving is obviously bad for business, but having people waiting in line longer than necessary also has a negative effect—small businesses are typically very cash flow dependent, and when credit card machines go offline during peak shopping times, those businesses lose sales. Additionally, every second of downtime means more opportunity for customers to head to a competitor’s store to do their shopping.

This is where Tyro comes in. During my conversation with Ed, I discovered a great story about how Tyro uses PagerDuty for incident management so that its platform stays up and running 24/7, helping small businesses avoid incidents like the above from happening. Tyro understands that cash flow is king for small businesses. It also understands that if its systems go down, it will heavily impact its customers’ top-line growth and profits. The lost revenue from not being able to accept credit cards reduces cash flow, which impacts the merchant’s ability to buy inventory or pay staff, vendors, utilities, rent … the list goes on.

Clearly, it’s crucial that small businesses can process sales more quickly and reliably to avoid cash flow issues. “If anything fails, customers can no longer accept payments,” said Ed. “It’s critical to us to ensure the platform is always up.” And much like how customers might start shopping with a competitor during peak season if they can’t use credit cards, merchants might switch to a different payment processing provider if outages occur too frequently. These are just a few big reasons why Tyro’s commitment to having a stable and smooth running platform is essential.

To meet that commitment, Tyro uses over one hundred microservices that support critical banking operations. A failure in any of them could trigger a major customer-impacting problem, which is where PagerDuty comes in. PagerDuty provides Tyro the assurance that if performance starts to slow on its platform, the necessary stakeholders will have visibility into the issue before it becomes a widespread incident. Using PagerDuty, Tyro can provide the right people with the right information so that they can acknowledge the problem and take quick action.

To learn more about how PagerDuty helps Tyro Payments stay up and running 24/7, check out the full story.