NHBC helps homeowners, builders with ITRS Uptrends
Buying a home is typically the single most important purchase decision most families will make in a lifetime. But even after mountains of paperwork are signed and the moving trucks are gone, there can still be a lot of unexpected “what ifs.”
For example, what should you do if you discover structural defects in your new home, or worse, face a costly financial burden to correct them? NHBC, a leading UK provider of warranty and insurance coverage for new homes, recently discovered that many of its customer-facing online portals were not meeting user expectations to address those questions.
Service outages were problematic and the potential for reputational damage was becoming more of an unacceptable reality. A new website monitoring solution was sorely needed to help ensure reliability concerns in a way that made better business sense.
The case for making the switch
NHBC covers 70% to 80% of new homes built in the UK. Its 10-year warranty coverage policy currently protects about 1.5 million new homes against damage caused by major structural defects in the property.
To service its consumer-facing operations for warranty concerns, the firm operates at least five websites hosted and managed by a third party. Lately, quality control issues were generating complaints from users and were piling up in the customer services department. NHBC quickly realized that it needed a new vendor to monitor performance metrics and eliminate avoidable service bottlenecks.
“Customers were saying the stability of those portals wasn’t great and they were not performing well. They were getting kicked out, getting error messages and getting 404s, etc.,” NHBC Service Transition Manager Ashley Snowdon said.
NHBC needed a website monitoring solution with feature-rich, detailed dashboards and a top-notch support team that makes SLA and uptime performance metrics clear by easy-to-make-sense-of incoming data. The search was on.
Out with the old, in with the new
NHBC faced several challenges as it emerged from the global pandemic. Besides a temporary dip in new home registrations during 2020 and reliability concerns with their customer-facing website portals, costs were an issue that didn’t make good business sense.
“For one, it (previous monitoring firm) was 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 really as feature rich as the Uptrends solution,” Snowdon said.
That’s when ITRS Uptrends stepped in to offer a performance driven, reliable synthetic monitoring solution better able to meet today’s digital experience demands. NHBC had lots of choices when it came to choosing a website monitoring provider, but it chose ITRS Uptrends over many other competitors because of the cost-effective quality of Uptrends’ offering overall. But more importantly, there’s the human element.
“We have a great rapport with Uptrends that really helps the whole relationship, enabling us to react quickly to service outages or degradation without fail. I can certainly say that ITRS Uptrends helps us proactively react to service outages and keeps MTTRS as low as possible, Snowdon added.”
For now, business is looking up post-pandemic and NHBC is ready for it. New home registrations were up 33% in Q3 2022 compared to the same period in the previous year. Close monitoring of backend systems lends itself to higher levels of agility and with that comes more reliable service offerings to customers on the front end. ITRS Uptrends will be there in the future as a partner for NHBC to grow and retain business through better website monitoring.
