ScottishPower Case Study
ScottishPower invested in Site Confidence performance monitoring to prevent lost business.
ScottishPower is a leading provider of energy, serving over five million homes and businesses in the UK and in the western United States.
Part of the Iberdrola group, ScottishPower is part of a world energy leader in wind power. It generates electricity, operates and maintains large power delivery networks and provides a full range of energy supply services for customers, including metering, billing and call centre support.
Challenge
With the increase in consumer internet usage and growth in online transactions, ensuring customers can log in to their Online Energy Service easily and efficiently is a high priority for ScottishPower (www.scottishpower.co.uk).
As well as keeping existing customers happy online, ScottishPower places a great emphasis on its' online comparison site in order to win new customers. Any technical problems on this area of the site could be damaging with potential customers leaving the site without the information they came for and visiting a better performing site of a competitor.
ScottishPower needed to ensure that this did not become a problem for customers and guarantee a high performance web site.
Solution
After a review of the marketplace ScottishPower chose to partner with performance monitoring and load testing experts, Site Confidence.
Site Confidence recommended that the customer account log in section be monitored every five minutes to ensure that any problems that could potentially frustrate a customer are caught and dealt with before they become a huge problem.
Using technology tailored to ScottishPower’s exact requirements Site Confidence simulates a user visiting the ScottishPower web site and captures the performance experienced by real users, giving a real world understanding of what they experience.
ScottishPower also uses Site Confidence to monitor its price comparison section to ensure prospective customers do not experience any technical problems during their search.
To give a real insight into the web site speed and availability that end users actuallyexperience when downloading pages, Site Confidence also monitor the homepage every five minutes with an XML feed going directly to the ScottishPower technical team for speed and ease of use.
Bob Dowson, Director at Site Confidence, said: "ScottishPower understand the critical importance of giving their customers and potential customers a stress-free online experience. Investing in our performance monitoring services provides them with real-time alerting so that problems can be fixed before any business is lost."
Results
John Murray, Product Development Manager, ScottishPower said: "We have at the heart of our operations, customer led processes. In order to ensure that an excellent service is being provided to our customers using the Online Energy Service, we need to be confident that this is being properly monitored. Site Confidence is now providing a detailed and value for money web site monitoring service. We have a large and complex infrastructure, the Site Confidence solution helps identify problems quickly, which means less downtime and more satisfied customers."
Dowson added: "It's great for Site Confidence to work with such a well known market leader like Scottish Power. I'm sure our relationship will have longevity and continue to be a great success."