Reed.co.uk have always adopted a proactive approach to online user experience, using a 3rd party website monitoring supplier to evaluate the performance of the portal for over 4 years. When Reed.co.uk recently decided that even further in depth monitoring was now required they selected SciVisum’s SV-Monitor service.

Overview

Established in 1995, Reed.co.uk has become the UK’s leading commercial job-site with over 300,000 live jobs. The integration of Reed’s on-line and physical presence has resulted in a database of 3 million job seekers registered on-line and through the branch network.

Reed is constantly developing innovative technical solutions to make the recruitment process as quick, efficient and cost effective as possible and offering clients a range of added-value business-to-business applications, such as online authorisation of timesheets and online access to financial account information.

Over 12,000 recruiters recruitment agencies and 6,000 employers use reed.co.uk to post jobs on the site free of charge, this means that the team have to run on a tight budget.

Reed.co.uk have always adopted a proactive approach to on-line user experience, using a 3rd party siteuptime type approach to evaluate the performance - speed, errors and consistency of simple pages on the portal for over 4 years. When Reed.co.uk recently decided that even further in depth monitoring was now required they selected SciVisum’s SV-Monitor service.

The Head of Technology for Reed.co.uk comments

"User experience is vital for such a busy site. Having decided that we needed to ramp up the level of our monitoring, towards more complex multi-page User Journeys that better reflect user experience, we looked around for suppliers.

"SciVisum was an obvious candidate because of their client list and their strong  focus on Dynamic User Journeys, that provided the powerful dynamic and random selection options that a recruitment site needs . We had also used worked previously with them at the end of 2006, to Load Test our portal prior to upgrading to a the .Net2 platform, so the keynote for us was the certainity that we knew that their technology was sound.

Solution

Reed.co.uk ran their existing monitoring supplier and SciVisum in parallel for an extended evaluation period, to put both services through their paces. The existing supplier elevated their service offering to the top grade, so that they were able to compare the best of both on their site, confidence enhancing the evaluation.

Results

Staff at Reed comment:

"Back when we first used SciVisum they may not have had an interface as intuitive as it has now become, but in our comparative tests of leading providers of monitoring services that we did then (and have run since) the consensus across between various key users here involved in the product testing was that SciVisum provided much better quality of data, much closer to a real users experience due to the dynamic journeys -and much richer technical drill down information for trouble shooting.
This was proven in the last weeks of the evaluation, when SciVisum identified sporadic errors that were impacting a percentage of users, which our existing supplier had failed to spot.
We're very much engineering and quality driven here -, we don't invest in products or services unless they will really help the business and provide ongoing quality."

On top of the superior technology, SciVisum's level of service was also a differentiator.

"SciVisum staff proactively contacted us (not the other way round) when there were quirky issues and subtle and intermittent errors occurring, and helped us to determine the root cause and quickly rectify the issues before they had an opportunity to affect users, decide that the problems they'd spotted were not just quirks of the testing but real, and helped us to dig into our platform and find the root causes. They SciVisum displays a flexibility and level of attention to customer input that is not only refreshing but also belies their relatively small size, their flexibility was refreshing.

The Reed.co.uk team now use SciVisum’s metrics in their monthly meetings and are in the process of bringing the executive Board up to speed with the value of User Journey based metrics so they can be used in quarterly meetings, Board Reports and strategic KPIs. They are in the process of adding a DashBoard dashboard for the wider business team.

In conclusion, the Head of Technology stated

"I’d like to think that we're knowledgeable buyers, at reed.co.uk we put a good amount of effort into the evaluation of the companies that we partner with. Based on the comparisons that we made our decision to choose SciVisum was an easy one. I'm happy to provide SciVisum with a reference and would recommend them to any other companies that, like us, depend on their web portals presence and are looking for a new level of KPIs. - SciVisum’s service is both technically the best and at the same time accessible and understandable to the wider business and commercial teams. "

Reed.co.uk website
SV-Monitor User Journey web monitoring service
SV-Load User Journey web load / web stress testing service

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