Tesco.com strives to perfect online customer experience

Launched in 2000, Tesco.com has grown to become the UK's largest online grocery retailer, and No.4 worldwide. Their UK grocery home shopping service now reaches 96% of UK households. Over 200,000 orders are processed every week.

Tesco.com has always strived to innovate for customers. It was the first supermarket to put into operation store-based picking for Internet shopping. Back in 2003 it was one of the first online retailers to provide a web portal version with 100% functionality for blind users.

In 2004 it became the first major British supermarket to enter the music download market and in recent years it has significantly expanded the ranges of non-foods available online - Tesco Direct offers over 8,000 non-food products via Tesco.com and other channels.

A philosophy that 'no one tries harder for customers' has driven Tesco.com to appoint SciVisum to help them perfect the online customer experience. They have followed a monitoring path that started with a simple siteuptime monitoring supplier.  But wanting a shift to truly dynamic Journeys, and having journeys in mind that reproduce a typical user's 60 or 70 product selection route they turned to SciVisum to provide 24/7 performance monitoring of key User Journeys on their main grocery website and other non-food sites. SciVisum's end-to-end User Journey approach monitors typical routes that customers take to search for products and services and purchase them online.

Head of IT Operations and Architecture at Tesco.com says:

"SciVisum quickly grasped our technology to script our User Journeys. They continue to maintain them with minimum input from my team. Our site is vast and as content is changing so rapidly, it is important to us to have a supplier that is able to respond quickly to any changes in our complex, dynamic random selection journeys. We have been very impressed by the responsiveness of the SciVisum team,  the keynote for us is that SciVisum worry about making the journeys work day in day out, we just specify what we want changed as our various sites evolve."

"SciVisum have also been fast to highlight potential performance issues as they come up. The in depth nature of their performance monitoring identified an issue early on, which we may have otherwise been unaware of. Back in May when SciVisum first began monitoring, they noticed that 2 of the web servers were serving out of date content, specifically special offers."

"There were no errors, no timeouts and page download speeds were good so we were unaware that 2 of our web servers were serving different content."

"We get much more valuable information from the web site testing  and monitoring service than I initially expected and we're only just beginning to evaluate all of the features offered by the portal. In particular we find the real time summary charts on the portal invaluable for giving us a status overview of all our journeys at a glance. We use the summary information for setting our business level KPIs and measuring against SLAs."

"The Internet is a hugely important channel for us. It's not always been an easy ride but we are continually striving to perfect the online customer experience."

"The monitoring carried out by SciVisum is crucial to ensure that we continue to understand our customers' online experience. Looking to the future we will be extending our use of dynamic  User Journey testing across our web site monitoring and working with SciVisum to develop new features so that we can maintain and improve all of our customer's journeys on Tesco.com"

Tesco.com website

Tesco's supplier system behind their web sales is vast and ranges from LCD TV warehouses to suppliers like Gomez Ltd's supply of Pick N Mix dried fruit.

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