Using Azure to improve tyre customers’ online experience and increase sales “‘What we've seen over the year is a significant increase in the revenue and profit we're making from the website. It's a 10-fold increase from the same level of traffic and Azure provides the foundations for this improvement.”

Morgan Jamison, Head of Retail Marketing, Protyre

Protyre is an independent chain of customer-focused, local garages offering tyre fitting, MOT and mechanical services. The company has more than 1,500 employees and 70 branches across the UK. It has ambitious growth plans and identified that the website had the potential to do more to help achieve that growth and support the company’s business goals.

Clicks to bricks

Describing the objectives of the new website build Morgan Jamison, Head of Retail Marketing at Protyre said, ‘We wanted to replicate the fantastic experience customers had in store on our website and improve conversion in doing so. We wanted a clicks to bricks model that would be unique and difficult to replicate,’

Because more people were shopping online for tyres (and also increasingly using phones and tablets to do so), it was important for Protyre to have a modern site that gave customers a great experience.

This was especially important because the company differentiates itself on customer service. ‘We’re looking to operate differently from the rest of the marketplace,’ says Morgan Jamison, ‘so that our customers trust and recommend us.’

This commitment is reflected in a net promoter score that is consistently above 80 percent. (To put this score in context, well-known consumer brands hover around 60-70 percent.)

Protyre is an independent chain of customer-focused, local garages offering tyre fitting, MOT and mechanical services. The company has more than 1,500 employees and 61 branches across the UK Results:

• Increased online conversions (up from 0.2 percent to 1.9 percent)

• A 10-fold increase in revenue and profit from the website

• Simplified PCI DSS compliance for processing customer credit card details

• Scalable solution that supports the company’s planned growth

Industry: Retail

Country: United Kingdom

Number of Users: 1500

Technology Environment: Azure

Connect with Protyre: www.protyre.co.uk

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published March 2015

Profound improvement

Protyre turned to specialist web development firm Profound for help with:

• Redesigning their website

• Making it easier to use

• Integrating it with centres’ stock control systems and diaries

• Emphasising the firm’s USPs, such as same-day fitting and large stocks of tyres

• Upselling MOTs and services

• Optimising the whole site for speed and to work on mobile devices

The new site lets customers see if the tyres they need are in stock and book an appointment to get them fitted on the same day. This is a unique offering in the market and Profound had to choreograph several different IT systems to make it work.

Not only that, but they can also book an MOT or a service at the same time. In order to offer this convenient service, Profound needed to connect legacy ERP systems and job calendars at each centre to the website.

Customer benefits of Azure

Not only did Azure help Profound complete the website faster, it also delivers valuable benefits for Protyre. ‘We wanted something that is scalable,’ says Protyre’s Morgan Jamison. The company plans to double in size over the next two years and each new centre has to be integrated into the website – both for stock control and for scheduling mechanical work.

Azure makes it easy to add new centres without buying any additional on-site servers and, as the company’s web traffic grows, Azure can scale up on demand. As Morgan Jamison says, ‘the capacity is there, ready and waiting’.

Stability and security were also important. With Microsoft’s backing, Protyre knew that their customers and data were in safe hands and Microsoft’s commitment to security made it easier to comply with PCI-DSS requirements for processing credit cards.

The role of Azure Profound used Azure to develop a better website for Protyre. They used a number of services, including Azure Web Apps, with automated scaling to cope with varying loads, Azure SQL Database Premium as the core database and Azure’s Content Delivery Network to improve page loading speed.

‘The key benefit of Azure is that lets us focus on customer business problems rather than the plumbing and infrastructure,’ says Profound’s Matt Quinn. It speeded up development thanks to support for continual integration and rapid deployment to development and staging websites.

But it goes beyond that by supporting continuous improvements to the site: ‘You have a hypothesis, you test it and then keep successful changes. The ability of the platform to support continual evolution is essential,’ says Matt Quinn.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published March 2015

Focusing on business results

Profound combines the creative aspects of web development with more technical software development under the same roof. ‘The beauty of our technology, including Microsoft Azure, is that clients don't need to care about the underlying techie stuff. We can take the discussion from “here's my business problem” to “here's the solution”,’ says Matt Quinn, a director at Profound.

The business benefits are clear. Protyre have seen a huge increase in conversions, from around 0.2 percent a year ago up to 1.9 percent online and 3.5 percent if you include tracked web-assisted phone sales. With the newly-launched mobile platform supporting visitors using phones and tablets, which account for a quarter of the company’s traffic, these conversion rates will improve further.

The results speak for themselves: ‘What we've seen over the year is a significant increase in the revenue and profit we're making from the website,’ says Morgan Jamison. ‘It's a 10-fold increase from the same level of traffic and Azure provides the foundations for this improvement.’

For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit: customers.microsoft.com