Customer case study: NHBC

Optimal user experiences for when it matters most

For most families, buying a home will be the single most important purchase they make in a lifetime. The UK’s National House-Building Council (NHBC) Is there to instil new homeowners with a sense of confidence in their decision.

Its consumer-facing operations are powered by a custom-built technology stack with at least five NHBC websites being hosted and managed by a third party. Therefore, it is critical that there are no user experience issues.

Challenges

NHBC faced several challenges as it emerged from the global pandemic.

Besides a temporary dip in new home registrations during 2020, NHBC engineers wrestled with quality-control issues with their customer-facing websites. Some of the website portals originally built and managed by a third-party provider were generating complaints from users that wound up in the Customer Service Department.

“Customers were saying the stability of those portals was not great and they are not performing well. They were getting kicked out, getting error messages, and getting 404s, etc.,” NHBC Service Transition Manager Ashley Snowdon said.

When looking for a performance monitoring solution, NHBC sought help from a company it had used previously for monitoring load testing of their websites. But the provider fell short on a few key product features. Infrastructure monitoring data was less than accurate and fell short of providing the kind of key metrics needed to run a multi-million-dollar organization successfully.

“For one, it was pretty expensive in comparison to the Uptrends offering. It was more like a bit of an add-on to their load-testing service, and it wasn't as feature-rich feature as the Uptrends solution,” Snowdon said.

NHBC needed a monitoring solution that could make performance metrics clear, so it was easy to make sense of the incoming data. For that, NHBC turned to the kind of detailed, cost-effective reporting that few monitoring providers aside from ITRS Uptrends can offer. Product performance and cost-effectiveness now favored Uptrends as NHBC’s new monitoring solution provider.

Company description:

NHBC provides warranties and insurance for new homes in the UK. With over 80 years of industry experience, NHBC has around 1,250 employees located in London, Belfast, and Milton Keynes.

Title:

With ITRS Uptrends, NHBC optimizes experience for homeowners and builders

Business challenges:

Needed monitoring solutions to ensure third-party suppliers were managing customer facing NHBC websites efficiently
Required private checkpoint to monitor applications behind firewall and single sign-on (SSO)
Needed a way to make SLA and total uptime clear, with metrics

ITRS Uptrends solutions:

Uptrends Enterprise
- Website uptime monitoring
- Web performance monitoring
- Transaction monitoring
- Internal server monitoring

Business benefits:

Can detect service failures and react quickly to outages or degradation
Issues flagged before internal monitoring detects them so can rectify immediately
Improved observability reduces downtime and avoids reputational damage

Supporting the switch to Uptrends monitoring

NHBC chose Uptrends over many other competitors based on the quality of its offering, attractive pricing and the results its monitoring brings them toward mean time to resolution (MTTR).

The monitoring solution in place prior to Uptrends was not always reliable in terms of the metrics being reported back to NHBC’s systems engineers. For a company with many customer-facing web portals and a reputation as a leader in the home warranty industry, the lack of system observability was unacceptable.

“We were struggling with the supplier who was telling us that everything looks green on our Oracle-based monitoring that we've got on the infrastructure stack. And, you know, they're saying it's green, but we're saying it's not.”

NHBC thought the time was right to put another set of eyes on its IT stack. Uptrends transaction monitors, infrastructure monitors and private checkpoints are the solutions it most relies on to detect service failures that may be happening to users.

The human element

Then there’s the human element. For one, the service responsiveness and support the company receives from Uptrends is nothing short of top-notch, Snowdon said.

“When we're talking about service, the support team, honestly in my view, is second to none.”

The property market is cyclical and when it gets busy NHBC is ready for it. By all accounts, ITRS Uptrends monitoring will be there as a partner to NHBC to help it grow and retain business in the future.

You can read the original customer case study here on ITRS Uptrends.

“Uptrends enables us to react quickly to the service outages or degradation, quite often Uptrends will alert us to these issues quicker than internal monitoring systems in the backend infrastructure. This means we can rectify these and reduce reputational damage.”