Backcountry Delivers Exceptional Customer Experiences Using PagerDuty

Backcountry.com makes a business out of understanding people who love the outdoors. These are customers who live and breathe hiking, biking, skiing, running and numerous other sports and activities. They’re on 24/7 and they’re always ready for another adventure. This is why Backcountry’s production infrastructure needs to work—and work well—so that these customers have an adventure equipment outlet that is just as reliable as the gear they use to traverse the great outdoors.

With Great Growth Comes Great Responsibility

Backcountry previously relied on a network operations center (NOC) that monitored their infrastructure with people around the clock to address problems. This central authority assigned issues to engineers when outages occurred, but the process was less than perfect.

“Things would break and not everyone who needed to know would be notified.”

As the company grew, a bigger customer base and high-traffic consumer holidays like Black Friday strained Backcountry’s infrastructure. The team needed a better way to maintain uptime, ensuring the right engineers were assigned to the right problems as quickly as possible.

“We needed more transparency into the process.”

Mata had implemented PagerDuty successfully at several previous companies, so he didn’t have to look far for Backcountry’s solution.

“The implementation was straight-forward and the UI was easy to use.”

PagerDuty was perfect for the company’s engineering culture, which values getting things done as transparently as possible. With PagerDuty, everyone, even those outside of the engineering teams, would know the state of the systems’ health.

More Resources Equal More Results

Every incident at Backcountry impacts revenue — so much so that their team tracks the business impact of their outages. Because of PagerDuty, they have more stability and better system reliability, and when outages do happen, they are able to efficiently address them, maintaining revenue and customer satisfaction.

PagerDuty changed the way Backcountry does business. Instead of just notifying engineers when issues occur, the NOC is now able to contribute even more value to the company. And it has more to work with since PagerDuty has streamlined operations by making their processes even more efficient.

“It’s allowed us to transform the NOC into a value-driving operation.”

Because PagerDuty aggregates all infrastructure data, the entire engineering team has full ownership of problems that occur. That means they’re enabled to fix things and fix them quickly, resulting in more reliable systems and happier customers.

“PagerDuty allows us to get things done and get them done transparently. That includes visibility into response time, incidents and engagement.”