Berry Bros. & Rudd (BBR) is a family-run British wine and spirits merchant founded in London in 1698 and is the official wine supplier
to the British Royal Family since the reign of King George III. Over the years, the company has grown from a small coffee shop into an
international business with six offices worldwide, including in Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. With this storied history also comes
the pursuit of excellence that has made the company a lasting success, and this extends to equipping its IT team to deliver productive
Microsoft Teams user experiences to its 450 employees, whether they are working remotely or from one of Berry Bros. & Rudd’s office
or warehouse locations. Vantage DX has given Berry Bros. & Rudd the visibility and insight they were previously lacking, to support
their users more efficiently and proactively.
In 2020, like much of the business world, Berry Bros. & Rudd saw many of its employees shift to remote work to manage the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, the company already had cloud-based collaboration tools in place to support productivity for their employees, with Microsoft 365 and Teams having been deployed previously to keep their global team connected.
As usage of Microsoft Teams skyrocketed for the company, it became increasingly challenging for the IT team to diagnose and fix the periodic performance issues that arose – from video freezing to garbled audio, that could be caused by any number of problems in the surrounding infrastructure, from overloaded home Wi-Fi to an ISP issue.
Chris Brown is the Head of Service Delivery for Berry Bros. & Rudd, managing the IT Operations team, including the network, business applications and other aspects of the IT infrastructure. “We lacked the necessary visibility to understand where in the journey from the end user to the Microsoft Datacenter a problem was occurring, particularly since we don’t have control over all components of this journey. This made it difficult to diagnose and address the problem efficiently for our users, who are now highly dependent on Teams to stay productive”, said Mr. Brown.
Vantage DX gave Berry Brothers & Rudd the visibility they needed to more efficiently support their Microsoft Teams users. With a view into the performance of each call, they can now easily identify which calls or locations are performing well, and where there are challenges. In the case of a poor call, they can drill down to know with certainty where in the call’s journey the problem occurred, to shorten the troubleshooting cycle and address the problem quickly.
Rather than running through a series of trial and error activities which take valuable time from the team, they can go directly to the source of the problem, whether it is the ISP, a failing network device or a circuitous route to the Microsoft datacenter.
Vantage DX soon became an important part of Berry Bros. & Rudd’s daily operations. While Vantage DX has addressed their requirements well, Head of Service Delivery Chris Brown highlights an unexpected benefit of the solution: “Often users don’t report a poor experience, they simply grow accustomed to subpar calls”, said Mr. Brown. “After deploying Vantage DX, not only were we able to more quickly identify the cause of user-reported problems, but we were also able to use the dashboards in Vantage DX to see which users were having a consistently poor experience. This meant we could proactively address the problems impacting these individuals and offer them a better, more productive user experience”.
The team at Berry Bros. & Rudd has made Vantage DX a part of their daily IT operations, after a smooth proof of concept, followed by deployment and training. The IT team has made the most of its new level of visibility into Microsoft Teams performance, responding to issues more efficiently armed with data rather than guesswork, and becoming more proactive in identifying problems before users report them.
“Often users don’t report a poor experience, they simply grow accustomed to subpar calls. After deploying Vantage DX, not only were we able to more quickly identify the cause of user-reported problems, but we were also able to use the dashboards in Vantage DX to see which users were having a consistently poor experience. This meant we could proactively address the problems impacting these individuals and offer them a better, more productive user experience.”
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