Case Study: Paddy Power

Paddy Power Betfair formed in 2016 following a merger between Paddy Power and Betfair, two of the UK largest sport betting and gaming operators.

With more than 2 million players on the site at any one time, Paddy Power is obsessed with giving their users the best digital experience. To ensure this offering is perfected, they turned to Eggplant.

Optimizing User Experience:

Optimizing the customer experience is the holy grail for all digital businesses. Understanding all the technical metrics businesses work on to improve the digital experience will ensure a customer feels completely frictionless whilst they are going through that experience. Paddy Power understood this  was critical - performance and usability play a vital role in user satisfaction, productivity, adoption, and ultimately, retention.

To understand the connection between the technical back-end of the business and how that translates to what their customers experience they turned to Eggplant Performance Analyzer.

“A year ago we started to use Eggplant Performance Analyzer to automate our load-speed measurement process. We needed a tool that would sit in the background and measure not only our different internal brands, but also externally; setting a benchmark to monitor competitors' performance and how we sit relative to them. 

“Using Eggplant has given us a holistic view of how the technical work we do impacts our customers,”  David McGarth, Performance Analyst at Paddy Power Betfair, explains the importance of achieving outstanding customer experience.

Process Automation:

There is an urban legend at Paddy Power that they used to use a stopwatch to time load speeds. Thankfully now, the business has made major leaps away from this analogue experience towards a smarter digital one.

“When the idea of product performance became an important part of the business that was the only option the team had. Having a single person sitting there looking at pages and timing their load speed wasn’t time effective and we realized getting mundane tasks out of the hands of analysts and product managers was critical for overall business performance. We went looking for tools that could help us change that, and that’s how we discovered Eggplant.”  

A Dynamic Platform:

One thing that sets a gaming or betting site apart from other websites is how dynamic the user experience and customer journey could be.

For Paddy Power, their user journeys are varied and the number of permutations a customer could potentially execute runs easily into six figures when they are just two or three clicks away from the home page.

“Because the customer journeys are varied and dynamic, it can be quite a challenge to capture everything in a signal quantitative way.

 “Eggplant gives us a better picture of how the user experience looks from the perspective of the customer. We now track a number of different journeys on pages to look for quantitative measurements - everything from just a simple uncashed page journey, through to a customer logging in, or accessing ‘look at my funds’.

“That data and information has enabled us to build better business cases for working towards better customer outcomes.”

DevOps coming to life

Optimizing the customer experience is something Paddy Power’s analysts live and die by, but truly optimizing this would be impossible without harnessing the power of true DevOps. 

Eggplant enables Paddy Power to understand how users are really utilizing their digital assets, so they can then eductate development tasks based on that to truly create a frictionless experience.

At Paddy Power, the commercial products department looks at how product performance affects operational outcomes and works closely with the DevOps team, the product owners, the delivery managers and the architects to ensure it comes to life. However, building a business case to the DevOps team requires quantitative data to demonstrate how the performance of the product affects commercial outcomes and how the two teams can work together to improve those customer outcomes.

“The Eggplant Performance Analyzer has filled a void for us. We now have quantitative, consistent measurement of our site from a customer perspective and can utilize this data to convey to the development team how to improve our product. We can also relay this to the commercial team and demonstrate to them how to drive the product to improve customer outcomes.”

Using the Eggplant Performance Analyzer, Paddy Power has been able to use a simple and ready to use tool to help visualize data as well as scaling up.

“I'm not from a technical background so when I started it was quite a daunting task. However, once I started it was easy to pick up and a simple, flexible tool to use. For example, the scheduling for automation is quite simple compared to a lot of tools.

“This meant that for me as an analyst starting out, I could quickly begin to input everything I wanted included. The Eggplant support team is always on-hand if I ever have any questions - this has made it easy for us to expand what we've been doing, and in many senses,  made it a scalable product in our ecosystem.”

What next?
“We're very happy with the Eggplant Performance Analyzer product and we love using it. We've got new developments coming all the time, as well as new products coming out and a couple of big projects which we're looking towards. Performance and load speed performance is a large part of that, so we're looking forward to continuing using the Performance Analyzer and working with Eggplant to drive positive customer outcomes.”