Specsavers enhances customer experience

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Specsavers enhances customer experience.

When Specsavers launched an online facility enabling customers to try frames on at home, it prompted a move to outsource its media service to a reliable third party.  One in four people who wear glasses in the UK choose to buy them from Specsavers so when the company launched its Digital Mirror application it knew demand for the service would be high.

IT Accounts Manager, Chris Corbin, said: We wanted to make the buying experience even easier for our customers by allowing them to try on over 1,000 different frames in the comfort of their own home. The result is Digital Mirror which enables visitors to the website to upload their own photo and view themselves wearing any frame on the site.  

Quick and easy to use, Digital Mirror enables customers to find the best shape, size and colour of glasses to suit their face shape and skin tone and, once theyve found the perfect pair, they can then either print out their selection and take it to their nearest store or, alternatively, buy them online.

In order for Digital Mirror to achieve its full potential, and to minimise its impact on the rest of the sites performance, the decision was made to outsource the media service to a hosting provider.

We knew from the success of a previous rich media campaign that such high levels of demand could impact our system performance significantly, so it made sense to de-risk our media service by taking it outside of our network.

Kingston Communications was awarded the hosting contract following a site visit to its London Global Switch Data Centre which provides a secure, managed server environment with 24/7 monitoring of the system, 24/7 support from an engineering team and high speed Internet access and their sector expertise.

As well as their state of the art premises, KC has a proven track record of providing hosting for other major high street retailers which means we benefit from their knowledge and experience as well as their significant infrastructure.

With an average of 1.4 million frames being tried on per month and 25 % of visitors to the site using the service, speed, reliability and uptime are critical components of the applications continued popularity.

KCs infrastructure enables our website to deliver the polished performance we set out to achieve, 365 days of the year. Highly responsive, it copes easily with fluctuating demand all with the added reassurance of sophisticated back up and data recovery processes.    

Following the success of the Digital Mirror application, Specsavers has recently added streaming to the site hosted by KC on its streaming media server in order to show videos and advertisements along with cinema quality animation of the customer journey through its optical processes.

Specsavers dedicated KC Account Manager, Rodney Sealy, adds: Were delighted to be working with the market leader in this particular sector and to provide the infrastructure that underpins such an innovative concept as Digital Mirror.

Our hosting service provides cost effective access to hardware and support services which would be cost prohibitive for most companies to have in-house while our 100% SLA, which comes as standard with all hosting contracts, underlines our confidence in the products that we provide.