Introduction
T-Mobile, a 100% subsidiary company of Deutsche Telekom, is a mobile communications provider and offers products and services to consumers as well as business users. With a yearly return of 1.138 billion euro in 2006 and 2.6 million active customers in the Netherlands (30 September 2007), T-Mobile boasts the number three position in the Dutch market.
Target website: sales and self-service
The website plays an important role in the service provision of T-Mobile, it should be available 24/7 and provide excellent performance. A significant part of T-mobile’s sales occurs online. Should the site be down, it is impossible to take out online contracts or purchase prepaids, this is a missed opportunity and is detrimental to the brand.
The importance of the website increases the need for a performance monitoring tool
Due to the increase in the use of the website, it has become extremely important for T-Mobile to obtain information on the performance and availability of all portals. The previous synthetic monitoring tool was insufficient, because this only simulated the experience of one user.
Emile Mersman, Service Manager Content and Portals, has this to say, “In order to discuss numbers instead of feelings, you have to know what the customer really experiences! It is not possible to draw any generic conclusions from simulations only. We want to provide information to the business as well as the IT development department regarding response times, errors, availability, etc. For this reason we need a very secure user monitoring solution able to measure all our traffic non-intrusively”.
webProbe, the enterprising Real User Monitoring solution by Moniforce
Emile Mersman adds, “During market research we came across Moniforce. The information on webProbe impressed us to the degree that we decided to attend a workshop on real user monitoring at their offices. Subsequently, it transpired that webProbe offers the ideal solution and Moniforce is a party that dovetails with us – a Dutch company with an impressive list of clients, their own support and R & D department and short lines. We decided, in conjunction with Moniforce, to run a pilot with webProbe and to decide within that time which other specific T-Mobile wishes we wanted to implement.”
Results: Insight into end-user experiences offers cost-reduction and provides business and IT-alignment
webProbe enables T-Mobile to identify problems quickly, to prioritise them and to assign them to the responsible department. Mersman enthuses, “A few months ago we had an issue with one of our portals. The agreed upon KPI with our internal client hadn’t been attained for a while. After releasing a new application, we could prove with webProbe that the response time had been lowered by 30%! In addition we have fortified our service management role with webProbe. Based on numbers, we are now able to show that the agreements between business and IT have been attained. In addition, we are able to switch pro-actively when something is about to go awry.”
webProbe is also an important source of information for capacity planning. “We can now predict which effect the use of extra hardware resources will have on performance and customer satisfaction. This enables us to invest more accurately.”
Application quality and content management is also frequently used by T-Mobile – it is possible to measure the size of the objects on the page, the effect of adding extra java scripts will have on the performance, etc. This approach enables content managers to determine exactly what they can or cannot put up and visitors are not confronted with long download times.
Mersman ends, “Moniforce is a very professional organisation which works swiftly and flexibly and webProbe has promptly proven itself at T-Mobile. We expect to expand its use in the future and to deepen our relationship with Moniforce.”