SciVisum’s ‘User Journeys’ deliver excellence to P&O’s web services

P&O Ferries is the UK’s leading ferry operator with the largest fleet of ships delivering the most frequent passenger and freight services to the Continent. A high percentage of its customer bookings are placed via the company’s website with an estimated 10 million visitors during 2010. To ensure excellence from its web services, P&O is working with SciVisum, a market-leader in UK website monitoring.

Need
Ken Foulis, Computer Operations Manager at P&O Ferries says, “Having a reliable web service is always vital and we need to be prepared for massive bursts in visitor numbers to the website driven by new marketing campaigns. Excellent website performance is even more essential during natural disasters such as the Icelandic volcanic incident earlier in 2010 – during these times, our customers are often in a stressful situation and they must to be dealt with accurately and efficiently.”

Ken’s team is based at the company’s Dover head office and is responsible for all P&O’s IS systems including reservations, freight, tourist and the web. It’s a 24/7 operation for the team of 14 people which includes the service desk.

Ken explains, "We were concerned about moving from our previous website monitoring supplier but have been very pleasantly surprised by SciVisum. We selected SciVisum because they offered a more comprehensive and cost effective service.”

Solution
SciVisum has been working with P&O for over a year and continually checks the web site by running a series of scripts that follow the journey a customer would take when making a booking. SciVisum has also developed a new feature specifically for P&O that enables the P&O team to make annotations against errors with details on why it occurred and actions taken.

“We rely on SciVisum to alert us if something goes wrong,” continues Ken. “If an alert goes off, we then manually test the site. On one occasion, SciVisum’s alert prompted us to look at the four servers that manage the booking process – these are designed to share the load when we are busy. However, on this occasion we found that one of the servers had too many threads (or customers) and was not passing them on. A simple reboot of the server got it working correctly.”

In tandem, P&O notifies SciVisum when they are taking the website down for house-keeping so that the alarms are cancelled. Ken notes, “When we undertake un-scheduled updates, we receive an alert from SciVisum within a minute or two identifying a problem. It’s quite a reassuring check when the site is running smoothly.”

Results
Ken confirms, “The web is a significant income for our business and SciVisum gives us peace of mind. They remove the manual process and leave us free to focus on other activities. SciVisum upgrades the system regularly but there is little need to chase for anything - it’s an engine that works well and does an excellent job. SciVisum is exceptionally pro-active, quick to respond to queries and issues; and the alerting is spot on and quick. I'd recommend them to anyone.”

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