Cineworld monitors site upgrade success
By Retail Technology | Monday November 11 2013
New advanced multi-site monitoring service developed for major website upgrade of cinema chain comes to market after successful deployment
UK cinema chain Cineworld called on SciVisum to create a new Multisystem Intelligent Monitoring service to ensure its upgraded e-commerce website containing 80 cinema locations delivers the best possible booking service to customers.
The success of the new site has propelled Cineworld to the position of the 25th most visited e-retail website in the UK, according to IMRG and Experian figures published in August 2013.
Supporting major IT transformation
Cineworld undertook a major redesign of its e-commerce website to incorporate the online ticket sales for the 80 cinemas under its Cineworld Cinemas brand, of which 77 are multiplex cinemas with five screens or more. Alongside the redesign, there was also a major IT transformation project replacing all of Cineworld’s back-office systems, which the new website needed to integrate with.
Regan Andrew, Cineworld head of e-commerce, headed the redesign project and is responsible for driving sales via Cineworld’s website, as well as for all bookings via phone and mobile.
“The new site is connected to all the cinemas in real-time and integrates with other third party systems, which are outside of our control,” Andrew said. “Rather than monitoring each of these systems separately, we needed to monitor the website from a customer’s perspective without it being too expensive or a nightmare to administer.”
He added: “Having worked with SciVisum before while I was at Transport for London, I was keen to use their user-journey monitoring service so that we could see exactly how customers were experiencing our services. We asked SciVisum to suggest a new way to address our needs.”
Developing IT monitoring service
To monitor all Cineworld’s cinemas, SciVisum developed a new multi-site service with added intelligence. Rather than monitoring all 80 locations with identical user journeys, SciVisum created a highly cost effective and time-saving service that still delivered complete peace of mind.
The new MultiSystem Intelligent Monitoring service uses a more advanced two-level hierarchy of core and investigating user journeys to identify a failing system and provide fast alerts.
The user journeys test the cinemas in a round-robin fashion. When an error is detected the service determines whether it’s at a specific cinema location. An additional 'investigating journey' is then triggered to investigate the error further, while the 'core journey' continues testing each cinema location in turn.
If the 'investigating journey' confirms an error, an alert is sent by SMS or email to the support teams. The journey continues to monitor the location until it is resolved, at which point a recovery alert is sent out.
The Cineworld e-commerce and IT teams now have SciVisum’s live data for all 80 sites clearly displayed on wallboards throughout the day. The tiled display makes it easy to quickly identify those Cinemas with ‘warnings’ shown in yellow and cinemas with errors in red.
“Now when we launch any new element on the site, we are monitoring its immediate impact on the customer. With SciVisum’s user-journey monitoring, we can see instantly if there are any problems and ensure the site remains as easy to use as before,” explained Andrew.
Successful technology project results
Cineworld’s online and mobile sales have nearly tripled during 2012 and the first part of 2013. Overall customer traffic has also increased significantly.
“The integration project went really well. For such a big project it was one of the smoothest I’ve ever undertaken in terms of the technology and SciVisum’s new service was an integral part of its success. The new website has delivered significant gains with major improvements in both conversion rates and visits,” confirmed Andrew.
He concluded: “At Cineworld, we work in an agile manner, where we aim to support changes, be flexible and respond quickly to new opportunities. The team at SciVisum has been equally as flexible and collaborative in line with our agile working methods. This has made the relationship firstly possible and also successful. If we’d signed a technical specification and a technology plan at the beginning and then had to administer bureaucratic changes in the process, it just wouldn’t have worked.”
Following its success with Cineworld, SciVisum is now offering its MultiSystem Intelligent Monitoring to all customers.
