Coffee & Commerce with Cascone: Holiday Readiness with Bluecore’s Morris Chen

For retailers, September is traditionally the most critical time of year when it comes to holiday readiness. That means at Bluecore, we have to be prepared to serve our customers and ensure our systems are ready. 

Join Sarah Cascone and Morris Chen, Bluecore’s Director of Engineering as they discuss how Bluecore prepares, tests and analyzes customer data to keep our solution at peak performance when it matters most.

Sarah: Welcome back to Coffee & Commerce everyone. So we’re going to talk about holiday readiness today. Joining me to dig into that is Bluecore’s Director of Engineering Operations, Morris Chen, who has been leading the charge in making sure Bluecore customers have a wildly successful and seamless holiday season for the past six years. Morris, thanks for joining me.

Morris: Thanks for having me.

Sarah: So how do you ensure as a retailer that your tech stack is ready for the holiday season?

Morris: We recognize that this is traditionally the most critical time of year for many in retail marketing. This is often make or break for our customers. So each year we go through holiday readiness planning, which begins half a year before the Black Friday Cyber Monday period, which means we’re already well underway with these efforts. One of the first things we do is forecast holiday needs. There are several factors we have to consider here, including analyzing historical trends, industry trends, and all of our own internal data to determine an aggressive estimate for the level of effort needed to serve our customer.

From there, we can establish holiday service level objectives for our systems so we have clear targets to move towards. With these targets, we can then assess what areas of our system may be at risk and will need to be rebuilt or reinforced to meet these targets and how much work it’d actually take to get there. This is necessary for capacity planning to make sure we’re allocating enough resources towards these efforts.

Sarah: And with all that work that needs to be done, how do you know we’re ready to handle holiday volumes for something like email, for example, which is a highly leveraged channel for retailers during this time?

Morris: The answer lies in what we call a game day. Game days essentially involve simulating expected holiday behavior, and then monitoring those results. So here we’re testing our system to our expected target levels and beyond to ensure our system is actually ready to serve all of our customers.

This also includes making sure we can process all of our customer’s events to smoothly send all of their needs. To give you an approximate idea for the magnitude of testing we do, and the level of preparedness we aspire towards each year, we successfully test around two times our anticipated peak quality volumes.

So for example, if a normal day is 1X during the holidays we might expect 4X volumes, we make sure that we can handle 8X our normal volumes. In other words, we’re prepared to handle unplanned, last-minute high-volume sends for our customers. In the past, we’ve actually had partners where in the last month, or even week leading up to Black Friday Cyber Monday ask if we could handle a multimillion customer full batch email send.

And while it’s always better if we know these in advance, we know that we also can handle these with confidence if indeed they come up and they’re not an issue for us.

Sarah: For sure. I love that we can be that reliable system for them. And you know, there are brands who are looking to see more performance in the fall, then they may have expected, or that they are seeing, and might need to recognize switching vendors, even in the middle of the season, but could be uncertain about it. Given the pressure on that time. What do you recommend for retailers in this position?

Morris: Yeah, well, I’m an engineer at heart, so if you’re asking me personally, I need to see that data — show me that proof. Actually part of my responsibility as the head of our engineering operations team is to manage the relationships with our software vendors here at Bluecore. So when we’re doing our own vendor assessments, one of the things that gives me a sense of confidence that we found the right vendor is that they’re willing to provide working proof of concept or free trial. You know, RFPs are one thing, but seeing a vendor solution actually deliver what they advertise is a whole nother.

Now, I’m not a marketing manager. I can only imagine how much stress there is for them during their critical sales season. However, I’d like to think one way that they might be able to lower that stress level is to see their platform, walk them through how they’re preparing for the holidays and already be handling their expected peak, personalized send volumes.

Sarah: On June 8th, it felt like half the internet was out when there was a widespread outage across the web. It even affected Amazon, CNN, and Hulu. Then in July on the 22nd, I believe there was another major outage with reports coming in that over 3,200 websites were down. So what does Bluecore do to prevent these types of outages from happening?

Morris: Well, we spend half of your planning to be ready for the holidays and already have redundancies in our system to medicate that chance of an outage. We draw regularly for these situations so that in the very rare case that an outage does happen, we have swift protocols to alert our customers and diagnose and solve the issues immediately.

In addition, our engineering team has multiple 24/7 on-call rotations year round. And during the holidays we add additional on-call rotations for extra support.

Sarah: This has been an interesting conversation, Morris, and it’s so cool to see how much work and planning goes into supporting retailers during such an important time of year for them. We’ll definitely be sure to share the insights so everyone feels really prepared. And thank you so much, Morris, for joining and thank you to everyone. This is Coffee & Commerce.

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