Golden Gates Housing case study

About

Golden Gates Housing is Warrington Borough Council’s Arms Length Management Organisation (ALMO). It manages 9,000 homes across some of the most deprived wards in the UK.

Challenge

The Audit Commission has awarded Golden Gates Housing its highest rating – three stars with excellent prospects for improvement. A key driver behind this assessment was their use of technology for the benefit of customers.

The Commission went on to state that: “Many of the ICT tools being developed are at the forefront of use for housing organisations.”

Golden Gates Housing has seen a revolution in how it does business with its customers and the Audit Commission confirmed that it found “a significant investment has been made in ICT resulting in the development of impressive interlinked and interactive systems to support staff and service delivery to customers”

The Internet is critical to Golden Gates Housing’s plans for taking its business to the next level.

Solution

In order to investigate the performance of its web infrastructure, server and capacity and assess its robustness, Golden Gates Housing partnered with Site Confidence, NCC Group’s web site monitoring and performance testing division.

Site Confidence provides an end-to-end reporting service which monitors a website from a user's perspective, allowing customers to take control of the data on their web site and to gain an overall analysis of their site.

Specific services include, looking into the:

• Performance of specific pages over specified periods of time
• Availability of secure pages (where log-in is required)
• Quality and speed of results delivered by search function
• Web site monitoring of multiple step transaction processes (e.g. requesting repairs, paying rent)
• Speed and content of responses to enquiries received via automated messages
• Benchmarking of performance against competitors
• SLA performance monitoring to support service delivery by or to a third party

Results

At any time, Golden Gates Housing can view a snapshot of its web site’s performance and identify any trends, recurring problems or potential areas for improvement, enabling it to respond quickly to any performance issue that could arise.

Peter Fitzhenry, Director of Housing Management, Golden Gates Housing commented: “Working with Site Confidence has given us great insight into the performance and availability of our web site. Through detailed testing exercises we looked at the web site through the eyes of our tenants, ensuring that if problems arise, we can solve them immediately. It would be impossible for us to monitor our site with as much dedication and with as much detail in-house.”

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