How Cayuse Prevents 90% of Customer-Facing Issues
Learn how Cayuse’s engineering teams proactively resolve issues with PlayerZero, cutting high-priority customer ticket volume, and increasing their customer satisfaction score.
90% of issues fixed and identified before they reach the customer through enhanced visibility into the code base
80% reduction in the average time to resolution by running tickets through PlayerZero
Significantly more resources dedicated to proactive monitoring and remedial action
“PlayerZero has improved our ability to proactively detect and address issues earlier in the development lifecycle. It’s helped us streamline ticket resolution and enhance overall product stability.”
— John Nord, Chief Information and Technology Officer at Cayuse
About
Cayuse is a cloud-based research platform serving over 700 global research institutions across higher education, healthcare, biotech, pharma, and governmental research organizations. With 20+ connected apps, the platform streamlines the research lifecycle from pre-award proposals to post-award compliance.
Cayuse employs a diverse technology stack that supports its suite of applications designed for managing the full research lifecycle. These include programming languages such as Java, PHP, .NET, and backend and infrastructure technologies, such as AWS.
Challenge
Deliver more effective ticket resolution and improve customer satisfaction
With an expanding global reach and footprint, Cayuse faced the challenge of managing increasing complexity across their suite of products. When John Nord stepped into the role of CTO at Cayuse at the end of Q1 in 2024, alongside his responsibilities as CIO and CISO, he saw an opportunity to transform a complex tech organization into a modern, agile, high-performing team.
The most pressing challenge? Speed. Teams were balancing product roadmap and customer support tickets, which caused unnecessary prioritization discussions between the various departments involved. John needed to automate defect resolution and triage, making it easier for his teams to fix defects, deploy faster, and meet customer expectations — without additional administrative burden.
Cayuse explored traditional APM and observability tools, but most came with heavy implementation costs and slow time to value. PlayerZero stood out for their cost-effectiveness and rapid implementation, enabling Cayuse to improve customer ticket resolution times and boost customer satisfaction without delay.
“We wanted an analytics or observability tool to deliver insight, but we needed impact in weeks, not months. PlayerZero delivered on both fronts.”
Solution
How Cayuse gained instant clarity and remedies for production issues
PlayerZero integrates seamlessly with Cayuse’s technology stack, including applications built with Java, PHP, .NET, and backend and infrastructure hosted on AWS. By connecting code repositories, observability tools, and ticketing systems, it provides engineering teams with a unified view of issues across the development lifecycle.
Within days of connecting their products — including their flagship Sponsored Projects application — teams gained immediate visibility into the root cause of support tickets, without a complex setup or code changes.
With a hands-on approach, PlayerZero guided Cayuse’s engineers through the implementation process, which John says was key to the rollout’s success. Although initially skeptical, John’s team quickly saw the benefits — with direct visibility into code changes and pull requests, they addressed problems before deployment, slashed ticket resolution times, and improved productivity.
PlayerZero’s AI platform connected customer-reported issues to session data, logs, and code-level defects, enabling faster, more confident bug resolution. Early regression detection and auto-triage significantly reduced noise and customer ticket load.
By collecting all the information about bugs and other production issues and making it easily accessible in PlayerZero, all engineers can better understand and resolve the issues. Junior engineers have the autonomy to solve problems without waiting for senior guidance. This reduced the need for back-and-forth communication, making workflows more efficient and enhancing overall productivity.
Beyond faster resolution, PlayerZero helped unify support, product, and engineering teams under a shared understanding of customer pain points. It aggregates data from various sources — frontend events, backend traces, and user sessions — to create a comprehensive view of the user experience. This unified approach enables teams to trace issues across the stack efficiently. The platform became a single source of truth — building trust across the organization and reinforcing Cayuse’s culture of accountability and continuous improvement.
“PlayerZero gives us real-time, actionable insight into what’s going wrong — and where — so we can fix it more efficiently.”
Results
Engineers freed up to work on value-added projects and proactive problem-solving
With PlayerZero in place, Cayuse now operates with greater agility and confidence. Teams have instant visibility into issues as they occur, prioritizing and resolving customer-impacting problems before they escalate. The decline in high-priority customer tickets has allowed Cayuse’s engineers to focus more time on long-term improvements.
Support staff and engineers can now resolve tickets in a much shorter timeframe, freeing them up to dedicate more resources towards proactive monitoring and remedial action.
“PlayerZero is constantly developing new concepts, new ideas, and new ways of improving problem resolution. The platform is already great, but they keep innovating and coming up with ways to make it even greater.”
