Littlewoods targets online performance

Littlewoods Shop Direct Group is using website availability and performance monitoring systems to improve its online shopping experience and build on long-term IT infrastructure transformation investments.

The UK's leading home shopping retailer has been involved in transforming its operations for over three years. This latest appointment of Gomez, the web application experience management systems provider, will allow it to optimise speed and throughput on its customer-facing sites.

Littlewoods began using the Gomez Experience First platform to better understand how the customer experience offered by their websites was influenced by website performance in the summer of 2007.

"Within two weeks of first gathering data, we had identified and implemented several website performance improvements which substantially improved our customers' experience," a Littlewoods spokesperson said. "Since then, several new developments have been planned for 2008 which will allow us to further improve the speed and stability of our websites."

It is currently using Gomez's Active Network XF and Gomez's Active Last Mile XF services, to monitor how quickly its sites load when a customer visits online. By understanding how customers are affected by changes in this speed, Littlewoods can ensure the best measures are taken to keep the websites responding quickly and consistently.

"The data provided by the Gomez product range is now intrinsic to helping us continually put our customers first," added the Littlewoods spokesperson.

But the website optimisation work follows on from a series of projects to improve this and other, core areas of Littlewoods business. In April last year the group announced it had completed negotiations to streamline six suppliers and a whole range of data and telephony networks in a five-year, multi-million pound deal with Cable & Wireless. It was expected the network infrastructure would support the retailer's online business growth, which makes up around a quarter of its annual revenue.

Prior to that it had to integrate the legacy, bespoke IT infrastructures of its mail-order agency operations with brands including Great Universal, Kays and Choice as a result of their merger in 2005.

The integration involved the building of, and migration to, a common IT platform based on Littlewoods' infrastructure and the transfer of 23 million Shop Direct customer records and 6TB of commercial and marketing information systems data, allowing it to target a bigger customer base once, instead of twice.

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