iknow-uk
Why iKnow-uk knew why to call us
iknow-uk is one of the UK’s most
successful online hospitality and accommodation directories.
Launched in 2003, it’s won seven business awards, pulls in ten
million visitors a year, and has a 90% annual customer retention
rate.
As an internet pure-play, their website’s performance
is critical. Slow is bad, and downtime is an absolute no-no. So,
with this in mind and big growth plans of a 100% increase in
year-on-year traffic, the company came to us for help. Topping
their list of requests was boosting the reliability and performance
of their website.
When we first met up with the iknow-uk
team, they made one thing crystal clear: Every second their website
is out of action, they lose customers. A slow, dead or unresponsive
site means that customers would simply click away to a competitor’s
site.
And unlike retail stores, an online
business doesn’t get to keep office hours. Customers visit their
website 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Bookings can happen any
time of the day or night. The solution we came back with? Managed
Internet Access and Business Phone Lines. And a bit of
out-of-the-box thinking:
We suggested that as an internet
business, they cut out the middleman and do their own in-house web
hosting. When iknow-uk won the National Business Awards Regional
Winner for Growth Strategy, we couldn’t stop smiling for days.
We’re incredibly proud to be an integral part of their team.
Taking their online directory in new
directions
Once we put our advanced Managed
Internet Access service in place, iknow-uk could see the benefits
almost immediately. Platform stability: Up. Ease of management: Up.
Site traffic: Up.
Today, iknow-uk and 15 of their
regional sites use our Managed Internet Access as their lifeline.
The performance of their website is better than ever and the
company generated an estimated £169m in value for the UK tourism
industry in the last 12 months.
Why they stayed with us
iknow-uk’s runaway success and huge
90% customer retention figure comes from smart, confident
marketing. Their hospitality clients are offered a one month free
trial demonstration and a full money-back guarantee if their
advertising has not paid for itself within six months. Underpinning
this bold commitment is confidence in the availability of all their
websites.
Our designers and engineers spent time
getting well acquainted with iknow-uk’s business. And then we came
up with some fresh solutions.
First, we gave them our
high-performance Managed Internet Access service and Business Phone
Lines. This gave them faster than ever online speeds and improved
communications. And then we recommended iknow-uk have their website
hosted by the people they trust most – themselves. Hosting their
website in-house has saved them substantial costs and removed their
reliance on a third-party supplier.
Now their sites are always on, giving
their customers uninterrupted use of the websites and improving the
site experience.
Optimal business from optimised
search
Since we began our partnership,
iknow-uk has also improved their ability to rank highly with search
engines like Google and Yahoo! With their websites’uptime
consistency, search engine spiders have more access to their
website content and are able to update their results more
effectively. This has meant the iknow-uk sites have stayed higher
in the search results.
Holidays are big business
Another success for our clients has
been the innovative monitoring service that we offer them. iknow-uk
is now kept up to date with their bandwidth usage. They’re
experiencing such an increase in growth that their sites could go
over their current limits. So instead of reacting once sites have
slowed down, they can now preplan for these kinds of events.
In fact, since the implementation,
iknow-uk has requested two upgrades to their bandwidth to
accommodate all the new business. But that’s not the end of it:
Their service can still scale further to cope with future growth.
And by the looks of things, they’ll need it.
