As Leicester City Council has improved its online experience

Leicester City Council is the unitary body responsible for local government in Leicester, England. It consists of 54 deputies representing 22 courtyards in the city, under whose supervision the mayor is elected directly. It is currently controlled by the Labor Party and has been headed by Mayor Sir Peter Soulsby since his election on 6 May 2011.

As a unitary body, the council is responsible for managing almost all local services in Leicester, with the exception of the Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service and the Leicestershire Police, which are run by joint boards with Leicestershire Council and Rutland County Council.

Problem:

Leicester City Council needed a way to effectively and cost-effectively monitor the uptime of the wide range of online services it provides. The council serves the people, communities and businesses of Leicester, East Midlands ’largest city. It is committed to making its information and online services accessible to all and is constantly looking for ways to continually improve.

To provide people with a fast and reliable online experience, his web management team often conducts internal testing of websites and acts quickly according to user feedback. The council has several online systems covering recycling and waste management, health care, housing and education, municipal tax, employment opportunities and more. Some of these web interfaces are created by vendors, and part of the competence of the web management team is to oversee these relationships with vendors to ensure the efficient operation of sites.

Solution:

The Board began collaborating with RapidSpike in 2015 with the primary goal of monitoring uptime for a wide variety of website systems. The board has tried several other tools, but found that they either have poor functionality or are too expensive. They needed a fast, reliable and affordable system.

Now an important tool for business, RapidSpike is actively alerting the Board if any of its systems, including those managed by vendors, go offline. This means that the web management team is quickly aware of the problem and does not expect a dissatisfied tweet or message on Facebook or a call to customer support.

Using data from RapidSpike, the Board can approach vendors with evidence to address any issues, make improvements, and ensure they comply with service level agreements. Quarterly reports of downtime are transmitted and discussed at supplier meetings and within the Board.

The Board soon realized that RapidSpike offered much more website monitoring capabilities than it thought – also customizable to suit its requirements. Now, before launching any new online service, RapidSpike is used as part of the Board’s web testing tools to optimize performance, availability and security without having to go out of time manually.

Result:

RapidSpike has improved the Board’s reputation among key stakeholders because the web team knows accurately and quickly when systems are online and offline. They can take quick action to fix this before filing a complaint. This avoids escalating user dissatisfaction to other departments of the Board, which will soon hamper performance, not to mention the Board’s reputation.

The system has also helped improve relationships with suppliers. All vendors know that their service is controlled, which encourages them to pay more attention to their own systems. In fact, the service proved so useful that the web team recommended that vendors also implement it.

The Performance Monitoring Tool was supported by the Council when new regulatory requirements were introduced, including the 2018 Public Sector Accessibility Regulations (websites and mobile applications) (№ 2).

There has also been a saving of time and money, not least because you can now avoid five hours of manual testing before launching every time a new website is launched.

Adele Bibi, web manager for Leicester City Council, said: “If we didn’t have RapidSpike, we would have to use about forty other systems to replace everything it does. I don’t know of any other web monitoring service that offers such depth of functionality.

“The whole team, including the customer support team – in fact, everyone I’ve ever talked to at RapidSpike – has always been very helpful. There are no requests, changes or corrections that they have said they cannot make or will not add to their roadmap for future projects. “

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Tags: online, user experience, site monitoring