How Joining an Internet Exchange Ensures Customer Satisfaction and Trust

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how our consumers behave in various major areas of life — work, learning, communications, shopping, entertainment, health, wellbeing, etc. People have been forced to work and study remotely and turn to digital channels for almost all of their needs due to the stay-at-home orders and physical distancing policies. So, what does it mean for content and service providers? What can you do to leverage your potential?

Consumer Behavior in the Next Normal
According to McKinsey, although some of these behaviors only exist temporarily, most of them are likely to stick in the next normal. They mention remote work, telemedicine and e-pharmacy, digital entertainment, and e-commerce as some of the behaviors that will persist even after the pandemic. Now, what do all of these behaviors have in common? Correct! All of them are digitally replacing or complementing physical and in-person activities. This means that they involve digital user experience and require robust connectivity.

Shifting behaviors mean shifting expectations. In terms of their new digital lifestyle, today’s consumers expect three things from ISPs, content providers, and other digital services providers: reliability, security, and great user experience. Among various ways for service providers to ensure these three things, one of them is by joining an internet exchange (IX).

How IXs Help You Ensure Customer Satisfaction and Trust 
There are a number of ways joining an IX can help you ensure a positive user experience, reliability, and security.

Connections outside an IX environment, especially international links, are prone to high latency and congestion, creating lags and affecting website performance. By joining an IX, your network can peer with multiple other networks through a single connection and exchange traffic without involving a transit provider. This means that traffic is localized and the distance data has to travel from its source to its destination is shortened, resulting in reduced latency and improved round-trip time. It allows you to significantly improve your website response time, so visitors don’t have to wait too long for a page to load. It also ensures connection stability which allows you to consistently provide various content, services, and applications — even those that demand low-latency connections (videos, interactive content, etc.) — to your customers.

An IX also helps you to be customers’ preferred content or service providers because of your reliability. Customers tend to choose trustworthy providers with proven reliability, and being a member of an IX can be one of your evidences. To be able to join an IX, there are certain requirements you need to meet. Once you’re a member, you don’t automatically have peering agreements with other members there. You need to arrange a peering agreement with each member you wish to connect with, establish mutual benefits, and fulfill some technical requirements including security details. This means that becoming a member of an IX shows that you have what it takes to be a reliable provider: capacity, capabilities, reputation, and track record. These qualities will help you retain your existing customers and attract more customers. 

The two advantages above are the reasons why you should become a member of an IX. There are currently over twenty IX providers in Indonesia, including NCIX, to choose from. What you need to do is make sure your preferred provider guarantees not only high levels of performance, but also efficient and reliable services for its members.