LuLu*s, a women's clothing company, was created by Debra and Colleen Cannon, a mother-daughter duo based out of Chico, California. What began as a brick and mortar business soon grew to include an e-commerce component. In recent years LuLu*s has skyrocketed in popularity, and is now a nationally recognized brand.
The rapid growth of their business resulted in increasing connectivity problems for their customer service representatives, with the problems with network capacity causing webpages to load slowly, or calls with customers cutting out or dropping altogether. Emmanuel Relevo, Network Administrator for LuLu*s determined the bulk of the cause responsible was the fact that most of their 150+ employees were streaming music from their phones or computers throughout the day. With this in mind, Relevo contacted M&I to seek assistance.
M&I Senior Consultant Corey Davies performed an assessment and determined the best course of action would be to implement a Cisco Meraki Cloud Management solution. By utilizing this particular security measure, Relevo would be able to remotely monitor and control the security and bandwidth settings to allow for extended internal use, while still maintaining the integrity of the external service. In addition to this solution, a separate network was created for "morale" functions that employees could use to stream music to keep the main network free for work-related tasks.
I can look at the dashboard and see who's using the most bandwidth and what kind of traffic is traveling across the morale network, and if it's being used improperly I can shut it down. It's been fantastic to have that sort of visibility. Emmanuel Relevo Network Administrator
Once M&I had worked with LuLu*s to install Cisco Meraki, and implemented traffic shaping into the network to improve the quality of sensitive network traffic (like voice and video), customer service employees immediately noticed a huge difference in page load times and the quality of incoming calls from customers. When asked about how his experience working with M&I had been, Relevo had this to say, “It’s been deeply satisfying for me, and a great comfort, to know that that kind of expertise is available here in Chico.” —Emmanuel Relevo, LuLu*s