How Redbus slashed latencies by 2 seconds

“The most important adage and the only adage is, the customer comes first, whatever the business, the customer comes first.”—Kerry Stokes

In this age of technology, innovation, automation and also in the app world, it has become very important to nurture relationships with customers for growing a successful business. Caring for customers has never been more important. It’s more important than ever to create an excellent experience for your customers to help develop your company’s relationship with them.

On the similar lines, Redbus, one of India’s online ticketing apps, with millions of daily active users was facing problems in delivering the fastest user experience of mobile app to their customers. Given the unpredictable nature of network performance experienced by their users, to whom time is extremely important, they wanted a solution that could make their mobile apps fast so that their customers don’t have to suffer.

When we began our engagement with Redbus, we saw that 90% of their traffic were APIs, with some of the key ones related to routes, seat layout, and information on the cities traveled to

—Kartik Chandrayana, CEO & Co-founder, Twin Prime

Data shows that 57% of mobile customers abandon an app if they have to wait more than 3 seconds for content to load. Delivering an amazing mobile experience is important to all customers, especially Redbus whose brand promise is all about delivering the best customer service. They reached out to Twin Prime to ensure their mobile app delivered a fast user experience, in keeping with this customer service heritage.

THE FEARS
“When we began our engagement with Redbus, we saw that 90% of their traffic were Application Programming Interface (API), with some of the key ones related to routes, seat layout, and information on the cities traveled to. Bandwidth constraints inherent to the cellular networks created latency in the delivery of these API’s, which had a direct negative effect on their customer’s user experience,” adds Kartik Chandrayana, CEO & Co-founder, Twin Prime. The optimization technologies Redbus already had in place, including CDNs (Content Delivery Networks), compression technologies, etc, did not solve for these constraints as they did not focus on the wireless last mile, where 90% of mobile latency resides. Additionally, to protect the privacy of their users, Redbus encrypts all of their network requests using HTTPS, and the performance issues needed to be solved without access to the encryption keys.

OVERCOMING THE BARRIERS
Twin Prime’s mobile performance solution uses machine learning to analyze real-time network data, to deliver content up to 300% faster at any location, device, and network. Most companies have CDNs installed, but they don’t solve for the wireless last mile which is responsible for 70-90% of mobile latency. The installation accelerated the traffic over the wireless last mile, by using machine learning algorithms to continually update and maintain a global mobile performance heatmap. We know how wireless networks are architected, when they do not perform well, and what factors affect mobile performance for each user. They use this intelligence to create unique Machine Prepared Rules (MPRs), instructing apps on how to fetch content eliminating latency.

We needed a solution that would not only accelerate our APIs, but work with us as we expand into newer multimedia categories and with Twin Prime we were able to achieve this

—Phaneesh Gururaj, Director of Engineering, Redbus

When the solution got integrated into their app, Redbus was able to slash latencies on all their traffic by up to 2 seconds, and because Twin Prime optimizes all types of traffic including HTTPS, the company was able to provide these results while leaving their content encrypted end-to-end. Prior to utilizing the solution, just 55% of Redbus’s sessions were in the optimal performance range of 3 seconds or less. Once the solution was integrated into the app, the number grew to 87%—a whopping 58% growth.

After the integration, Redbus moved close to 50% more sessions to the optimal performance range. Phaneesh Gururaj, Director of Engineering at Redbus concludes, “Twin Prime is a good fit for us because it accelerates all type of content, regardless of size. He further adds, “We needed a solution that would not only accelerate our API’s, but work with us as we expand into newer multimedia categories. Our long-term vision is to be the ‘travel destination app in India’, and with Twin Prime we’ll be able to achieve this vision. Twin Prime has had a dramatic impact on the user experience of our app.”