Virgin Radio Case Study
Virgin Radio interacts with its listeners via the web with 24-hour web site monitoring from Site Confidence.
Virgin Radio is listened to online all over the world. Through www.virginradio.com listeners can interact with the DJs by phone, email or text; become a Virgin Radio VIP and receive priority information on bands, events or celebrity gossip; and even download clips or programmes from earlier broadcasts - all of which place differing technical demands on the systems in place.
Challenge
Establishing an online presence can be a complex process for commercial radio stations,
presenting both challenges and opportunities for a brand. The station hasn't achieved its
online status by being complacent about what its listeners want, it has invested heavily in
the development of its technical infrastructure to support the creative output of its DJs.
Using SMS and email helps boost listener figures, creating an interaction that
simultaneously assists data capture and reduces listener churn, making the station more
attractive to advertisers.
Virgin Radio, realised early on that far from just being able to stream the traditional
'over-the-air' signals over the Internet, a web presence could be a powerful and valuable
way of interacting with the station's listeners on a long-term basis.
As its web site presence grew, Virgin Radio realised that it could not give its listeners
the service they wanted unless it had an objective, external method of monitoring the
performance of its site.
Virgin Radio quickly realised that the most efficient way to manage its customer-facing functionality (SMS, email etc.) was to integrate these into its web servers, linking databases and archives to give listeners the seamless experience expected of the Virgin Radio brand.
Once the systems were all IP-based, however, it could only respond quickly and effectively if it knew immediately when there was a problem.
Solution
Virgin Radio enlisted the help of Site Confidence, the UK's leading web site performance monitoring company, for a solution.
Site Confidence provides an end-to-end reporting service which monitors a web site from a user's perspective, allowing customers to take control of the data on their web site and to gain an overall analysis of their site. A specific transaction, for instance, clicking on a link, can be monitored at high frequency levels (e.g. once every 5 minutes) to ensure requests for data are being processed as smoothly as possible every hour of the day.
As well as ensuring that Virgin Radio's web site performed perfectly from a listener's perspective, Site Confidence also devised a specialist monitoring service that could assess each individual server on a 24-hour basis.
Results
The specialist monitoring service allowed Site Confidence to immediately pinpoint a problem or error at server-level (rather than when the problem affected the user), and alert Virgin Radio IT staff by SMS in time for them to fix it without a user being aware.
Once it had the web site monitoring set up, Virgin Radio was also keen to know how its streaming performed on a 24-hour basis. The need for an adequate streaming monitoring service gave Site Confidence the necessary insight to begin development of this in-house, and an early version of this service (that checks for the presence of an HTML page to confirm the availability of the streamed broadcast) has already been deployed by Virgin, allowing the station to ensure people can always listen to the radio online.
Site Confidence has also assisted Virgin Radio when updating and altering its web site layout - providing feedback on teething problems caused by changes, smoothing out the technical operation, and helping to justify investment to the board.