Shearings Holidays

Stuff we do for Shearings

• WTP deployment on Amazon Cloud infrastructure
• Optimised web delivery; caching, minification & CDN
• Integration with Toccata booking engine
• Integrated product & content management
• Special offer & promotion management
• Multi-site, multi-user delivery

• High performance availability cache & search
• Information architecture
• Usability prototyping
• Creative web design
• Booking flow optimisation

Zolv took a daunting task and showed us that it really didn't have to be complicated.

Kevin Milnes, Head of E-commerce, Shearings

Challenge

A growing number of customers begin their relationship with Shearings online, so its websites are crucial to the business.

Although the Shearings.com website attracted the regular repeat traffic of longstanding Shearings customers, it was not presenting a consistent corporate image or online experience and was alienating potential new customers. Kevin Milnes, Head of E-commerce, Shearings, said, "Our existing customers had learnt how to use the site despite its shortcomings, but they were forced to search for holidays on our terms, rather than in the way that would be simplest for them."

Shearings sought to appoint a web development agency who would not only design, build and deliver a consistent, high quality website, but would also challenge their approach and bring ideas and industry best practice to the table. But the task was not going to be easy, said Milnes, "Internally we all felt the design challenge we faced was a daunting one. We needed a company which could design a site that was simple and usable but that would also cater for both new and existing customers in the same online environment."

Solution

Shearings had committed to overhauling the website prior to Kevin Milnes’ appointment, so on day one of his new role, Kevin found himself tasked with working alongside an external agency he had never met before. He said, "I was immediately impressed by Zolv. I’ve worked with a number of external agencies in the past who could only work in one way and force their clients to adapt. Zolv is a real rarity in the industry. They stepped back and adapted their processes to suit us and they continued to do so as the project evolved. They took a daunting task and showed us that it really didn’t have to be complicated at all."

Because of the older demographic of Shearings’ customer base, usability was key to the whole project and Zolv worked closely with usability agency We Are London during the design process. Numerous user testing sessions were held so that Zolv could see how Shearings customers interacted with the designs.

Zolv began by reducing the compartmentalisation that existed between the product offerings to provide Shearings with the ability to cross-sell and up-sell. Previously, holiday offerings were separated by coach, air, cruise or self-drive, offering the customer limited choice and reducing the opportunities to demonstrate the breadth of the Shearings offering.

Zolv has given us the tools to be far more agile and responsive

Kevin Milnes, Head of E-commerce, Shearings

Conclusion

The newly launched Shearings site is a living, dynamic website with richer content. The Zolv Web Travel Platform has allowed Shearings to create engaging promotional content keeping the website looking fresh, up-to-date, on-brand and inline with strategic commercial objectives. Said Milnes, "In the long term I expect to see massive cost savings and vastly improved operational efficiency but the real immediate benefit for us is the control and precision the Web Travel Platform has afforded us. We now have complete control over our web content and the messages we are conveying to customers. In a market like travel, being unable to respond immediately to customers’ needs will cost you bookings there and then."

"The key to the success of the website Zolv delivered was in its simplicity," says Milnes, "it is accessible to everyone because it gives customers simple choices to make at every stage of the browsing and booking process. There are no nasty surprises, everything is expected and there is an element of ‘hand-holding’ which is comforting to those who are less technologically savvy."

Since the launch of the new site, Zolv and Shearings have been responding to customers’ feedback and the changing requirements of the business through a rolling program of incremental developments which has contributed to a steady increase in traffic. During this time version 2.0 of WTP was being re-architected to maximise Amazon’s AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Automated Scaling and asset distribution via CDN and, in November 2010, Shearing’s websites moved into the cloud where concerns over bandwidth and server capacity are a thing of the past.

Shearings continues to be delighted with the level of service it receives from Zolv. "We receive a genuinely first-class project management service. They are responsive and professional and capable of dealing with a full range of Shearings stakeholders. It sounds like a cliché but they have truly become an extension of the Shearings team. The migration to the Cloud was painless and managed superbly by them. Crucially, the move has given us the flexibility to add more servers as required, ensuring our customers will only ever have a smooth, positive experience of our website."

Milnes concludes, "The continued future success of Shearings depends on having a successful online presence - it keeps us relevant. Crucially, Zolv has equipped us to be far more agile and responsive, keeping up with the changing travel landscape."