Dixons Retail Enhances Online Customer Experience with SciVisum

Dixons Retail Group is using SciVisum’s new SV-Monitor services to build a clear view of how its customers interact with its websites and are gaining huge strides in ensuring every visitor journey is successful.

“SciVisum’s key strength is usability. It’s up on the screens so everyone can see the journeys – red is bad, green is good. It’s very clear and very effective,” says Chris Howell IT director for Customer Systems at Dixons Retail Group.

Working with SciVisum, the leader in dynamic website monitoring, Dixons has been able to build a clear view of how its customers interact with its websites and are gaining huge strides in ensuring every visitor journey is successful.

“I’d worked with SciVisum in the past when I looked after Tesco’s online performance and found their services to be highly effective. So when the renewal came up, I invited SciVisum to show us what they could do. Our Service Delivery team rather liked it”

Need

“When I arrived at Dixons, they were using another monitoring system. I tried to use it but it just didn’t do what I needed. In fact, nobody used it in the business - when we were sent alerts, nobody believed them.” Chris explained.

The Group, with its multichannel approach to electrical retailing through brands such as PC World, Currys and Dixons.co.uk, is a business totally focused on understanding and managing the customers’ experience.

Chris Howell, IT director for Customer Systems at Dixons Retail Group, is responsible for the development of Dixons’ customer experience across all channels from stores to social media.

His initial approach in managing the performance of the Group online properties was based on a traditional systems monitoring role based around the typical Business As Usual questions such as ‘is it working?’ and ‘is it fast enough?

Solution

“One of the most valuable elements for our teams in Finance and in Service Delivery is the ability to see lost sales. This means we can see the commercial cost of any outage. SciVisum is our measure that the shop is open 24 hours a day. “ Chris continued.

Understanding this Chris was able to quickly demonstrate the value of having such performance information at his fingertips to all areas of the business. Strategic discussions about everything from improving the bottom line by preventing lost sales, building brand in the socially connected user communities, to budgeting, development and investment questions can be based on knowledge and insight, rather than gut feel.

“Within a week of using SciVisum, we had identified that a new ‘share it’ button on the pages that was a part of new marketing activity was adding an extra 30 seconds to load the page. Once discovered marketing and development worked together to find a better way to implement the function and get the results the business needed, and we regained those 30 seconds for the user.”

Dixons Group moved quickly to the concept of ‘customer experience monitoring’. Chris now asks ‘what does each customer want?’ and ‘have we served each individual’s requirements?’

To achieve this level of customer understanding, Dixons Group uses SciVisum’s dynamic user journey approach to help monitor each customer’s experience.

SciVisum’ dynamic user journeys are now being used across the websites of Dixons and PC World. The websites are tested every couple of minutes with a series of different journeys that mirror how a customer would interact with the sites. The journeys vary slightly to reflect the content of the different websites and cover general browsing and search as well as the navigation through the site to the check out. If a problem occurs, an alert is issued.

A visual report of the journeys is displayed in the IT department and the 24-hour operations room. Members of the ecommerce and the e-merchant teams also get copied on any alerts.

“I have to admit that our IT team sometimes hate the alerts because they can’t always explain why they've occurred. But we have full confidence is the SciVisum system. When it’s red something is wrong, we just need to track it down and correct it.”

Results

A final world from Chris Howell about the results DSG has acheived with SV-Monitor:

“The SciVisum user journey reports have quickly become part of the KPIs at Dixons Retail. And the services that SciVisum delivers have evolved with Dixons. “SciVisum is very responsive, helpful and excellent value for money. They've evolved with us, supporting us with lost sales calculations and business hour reporting functionality,”

“We are now moving towards being able to" see what the customer sees" from a monitoring perspective. However, we still need to keep building on the approach of being a customer facing organisation. We have sometimes overlooked the lessons we should have learned from because the results did not fit in with our view of how IT should support customers."

"It has been quite a journey so far, it will continue for a number of years, and it is by no means an easy one.”

Chris Howell of DSGi Speaking About Working With SciVisum

View the video of SciVisum at The Retail Business Technology Expo where Deri Jones, CEO, presented on the topic of "How Dixons Retail Group's focus on 'customer experience monitoring' has delivered increased online sales" alongside Chris Howell, IT Director of Dixons Retail Group.

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