Internet Congestion Destroys Customer Experience and Employee Engagement

QUESTION: Why are people still complaining when everything is green? ANSWER: When daily mobile orders suddenly decline for no apparent reason, when lines grow because the POS and the Kiosk transaction slow down dramatically, and/or when employees express frustration about doing simple things like clocking in or trying to complete video training, the likely culprit is congestion in the store network.
 
Imagine a superhighway where the availability of lanes continually fluctuates. Sometimes, 20 lanes are available, sometimes only two. Imagine a rule that says, you are not allowed to switch lanes and that when your lane is no longer available, you have to start over and go back to the beginning of your trip.  This is the problem with the Internet. So many fail to recognize the significance of two little words in their internet service agreements: "up to." The Internet does not come with guarantees. Sometimes, it will give you Gigabits of capacity; sometimes, it will give you less than 20 Mbps. With “best efforts” SLAs, no one gets to tell the internet how much capacity to give at any given point in time.
 
The solution is not necessarily simply buying more bandwidth. (congestion at 2 Gbps could be just as bad as congestion at 200 Mbps) The solution is to probe the internet for how many lanes are available and only allow the amount of traffic that will fit on the highways. In other words, if there are only five lanes available, only allow five lanes of traffic onto the highway. This way no one will have to start over. When no one has to start over, your #CustomerExperience and #EmployeeEngagement dramatically improve.
 
BONUS: QUESTION: why doesn’t prioritizing my applications solve the problem? ANSWER: prioritizing applications only impacts how the cars enter the highway. (E.g. High priority cars enter first.) It does not solve the problem of lanes closing once the car is already on the highway.  The only way to avoid dropping data during congestion is to not put it on the internet highway when there is no room for it. 
 
HINT: #SDWAN solutions vary widely in their ability to accurately timely measure available capacity and dynamically shape traffic to fit within the available capacity. Vet the solution at the sites with the highest KPIs for employee and/or customer complaints (slow apps, missing orders, etc.)