Business background
With close to 100 staff across three locations, Creditplus has become the UK’s most trusted authority on motor finance with its ‘find, fund and deliver’ approach to car buying. Now in its 15th year, it was the first company to sell a used car online without the customer physically being present back in 2004.
Creditplus looked to continue its track record of innovation and bring car financing in line with the wants and needs of consumers in the current digital age. They have made a ‘self-serve’ solution for their customers via a virtual showroom and online application-driven platform that saves customers time and makes the process more convenient.
The challenge
Due to the complex design of their ‘self-serve’ solution, Creditplus needed a reliable, managed hosting environment for their virtual showroom.
Creditplus approached Hyve to host their website after they experienced ongoing issues with their previous provider. Their developers required a stable and scalable system to build their application on, as they had faced several development challenges. Their solution was hosted on a single server, meaning that development work and moving between applications was very slow.
The team at Creditplus also found that they didn’t have a clear way to communicate with their previous provider’s support team. They needed responsive, personable customer service and technical assistance for their cloud services going forward.
Sam Bond, Head of Digital Delivery, at Creditplus said “As the development team began to plan the delivery of this ‘self-serve’ journey, we realised we were in need of a multi-server system, and more importantly, consistent and proactive support from a secure, reliable and managed service provider.”
The solution
Hyve provides Creditplus with a managed hosting solution for their growing car financing platform. Even from initial discussions with the Creditplus team, Hyve were enthusiastic about partnering with the company.
“From the first meeting, Hyve ensured all questions were answered before signing contracts. The plan was cost-effective and meant resources internally could be used for other key projects,” said Sam Bond.
Hyve’s technical architects worked with the team at Creditplus to divide their solution onto multiple servers. The support engineers spread out all of the applications from their server onto staging, development and production servers.
By spreading out all of the resource intensive jobs from their single existing server, Creditplus found that the development process was so much easier and their systems ran significantly faster. Without the introduction of the crucial staging environment, the developers at Creditplus wouldn’t have been able to test and implement changes for their dynamic environment.
Creditplus began using Hyve servers in June 2018. Hyve took control of the migration process and provided regular backups for total protection. The migration process was the biggest challenge, as it was expected to take a dedicated team at Creditplus over three months to complete. Hyve took control and managed the migration with one member of technical staff, allowing Creditplus to continue working on other important elements surrounding the implementation of its digital strategy.
As Creditplus continue to develop and provide a trustworthy car finance solution to their customers, the partnership with Hyve will evolve. Sam Bond added “In the future, as Creditplus’ marketing campaigns increase and traffic is driven to the site from various PR activities, it’s imperative the architecture will be able to handle dynamic loads and adjust accordingly. Our utmost trust is with Hyve to support this.”
The benefits
For customers looking to utilise a quick and easy car finance journey, by partnering with Hyve, Creditplus has been able to deliver a groundbreaking online self-serve platform. Crucially, the platform is underpinned by Hyve and the team’s attention to customer service.
Since deploying with Hyve, new features and bug fixes have been iterated and deployed on their servers. One of the key benefits is the reassurance of knowing that the team at Hyve are available when they need them to implement critical action on their behalf, all without requiring any internal resources.
Sam Bond explained, “Thanks to our partnership with Hyve, we have enabled our teams to operate at a faster pace, with the support and reliability we needed to push our self-serve platform to fruition.”
