For Hiscox UK, a leading specialist insurer, an outstanding customer experience is the top priority. To maintain this standard—from rapid claims processing to prompt query responses—the team recognized they needed deeper, real-time visibility into the digital services their customers rely on every day.
As Hiscox’s customer base scaled, maintaining elite service levels required a more sophisticated approach to technical oversight. The team recognized that moving toward real-time performance data would allow them to gain a deeper understanding of how their systems and websites were behaving, enabling Hiscox to be even more proactive in managing performance and operational issues.
New Relic is very easy to use. We like the way it flows and how the screens are set out. When you’ve got an issue, we can traverse right down to the log or query. It is just easy.
Hiscox recently migrated its UK observability platform to New Relic, driven by a group-wide initiative to consolidate monitoring to a single tool, reduce costs, and drive efficiencies. Observability empowers Hiscox to identify and address potential issues early before they impact the customer experience.
If you can query it, you can dashboard it
Drupal Front-end Quote dashboard
Ben Wright, site reliability engineer for Hiscox’s UK division, played a pivotal role in the decision to consolidate observability tooling. Ben saw potential in the full flexibility of New Relic's platform, particularly in custom dashboards. His goal was to not only provide greater depth for technical teams, but to create business-facing visualizations that generate new value for executive-level stakeholders. A rigorous proof of concept (PoC) demonstrated the superior capabilities of New Relic.
Our previous tool had dashboards but they were just not customizable; you can’t bring the information together in the way you can with New Relic. With our new tool, you can go down to the query language for the dashboards and make it your own. If you can query it, you can do it.
This new approach successfully broke down the traditional silos between technical and business units and enabled the entire organization to see immediate, measurable value.
The core difference for Ben was New Relic's flexible, data-first approach, which surpassed the constraints of the previous tool. New Relic Query Language (NRQL) gives complete control over data visualization and makes it easy to build custom dashboards.
"What I love the most about New Relic is the dashboards. The consolidated view it gives is just unreal... The visibility you get is second to none," said Ben.
This flexibility enabled Ben to design the dashboards Hiscox needed, not just what the tool dictated, ensuring they could adapt insights instantly based on feedback from key stakeholders.
Hiscox has used this new flexibility to build dashboards for technical and non-technical stakeholders across the organization. Teams now use real-time dashboards to monitor performance and customer behavior.
Real-time dashboards for executive and marketing
For Hiscox UK’s Drupal Visitor Strategy and Marketing teams, the Drupal Funnel Dashboard was created. This dashboard acts as the global truth for the health of Hiscox’s customer quote and buy process. On New Relic, the full-funnel dashboard shows real-time customer behaviors, trends, drop-offs, integration services utilized, and potential issues. The dashboard also helps calculate the potential revenue loss of technical glitches so they can be prioritized and fixed instantly.
These teams now have visibility into the entire customer journey, from landing pages to final quotes, on one screen. Hiscox marketing teams can now self-serve insights into customer engagement spikes, page load times, and traffic patterns directly through New Relic.
After seeing the success of this dashboard, Hiscox’s UK marketing team wanted further insights into specific spikes and dips in customer engagement during critical timeframes. Ben immediately leveraged New Relic's customization to create bespoke, real-time dashboards showing vital customer experience data points, including page load times and errors.
From a single demo we managed to solve many other problems the marketing team were having really quickly. It was a real eye opener for them.
The team was also interested in early detection and warning of bot price scraping. Ben delivered a new, highly specialized dashboard within an hour that immediately exposed abnormal patterns indicative of bot behavior. This was instrumental in cementing the value of Hiscox’s new observability strategy to non-technical teams.
Bot detection dashboard
Workflow and performance alerting for support teams
Hiscox has a complex workflow system from quote to claim. Anecdotal feedback suggested the system was running slower than expected, but Hiscox lacked the data to validate these concerns.
By consolidating all performance data, including cloud flow data from Dynamics 365 and API response times into New Relic, Hiscox now has an end-to-end view of the user experience. Support teams use these dashboards to track performance in real time. They monitor the average and maximum time taken to execute business processes, instantly seeing the success of system improvements.
Business and technical dashboard for Workflow end-to-end observability
With expanded data access, Hiscox now sets more accurate performance benchmarks. A primary example is its redefined non-functional requirements (SLAs) for the Workflow solution, which are now grounded in actual system behavior captured by New Relic. By instrumenting the entire end-to-end journey—from Dynamics 365 backend tasks to integrating APIs—New Relic provides a single pane of glass for real-time visuals and alerting. This ensures SLAs reflect the true user experience of its staff.
Automated alerts and anomaly detection now identify potential problems before they reach the end user. And, because everything feeds into a single platform, root cause analysis is faster, leading to improved service reliability. The application support team can resolve incidents much more quickly, significantly reducing downtime.
The impact: Data-driven performance and resilience
By transitioning to New Relic, Hiscox UK has moved from anecdotal feedback to data-driven decision making. Critical data is no longer siloed in IT. Marketing and executive teams now leverage observability to solve business-critical problems regarding customer engagement and system health, fostering a culture of transparency and informing faster decision-making.
Using New Relic to track average and maximum execution times for business processes, Hiscox can instantly validate the success of system enhancements. This has been vital in supporting Hiscox’s ongoing performance improvement plans.
Access to granular data has empowered Hiscox to set performance benchmarks based on actual system behavior.
Setting the new enterprise standard
Now that New Relic is Hiscox's observability tool of choice across the global enterprise. The next stage of Ben’s strategy includes:
1. Full Azure ecosystem integration
- Hiscox is scaling New Relic across the entire Microsoft Azure estate, including migrating Azure Logic Apps, Azure Function serverless solutions, Azure Front Door and web application firewalls.
2. Operational visibility and performance
- Ben is tackling performance bottlenecks within Hiscox’s Dynamics 365 workflow tools. By correlating backend API performance with UI rendering logs, the team is creating a glass box view of the user journey and surfacing it onto dashboards.
3. Tool consolidation and strategic growth
- The focus remains on retiring redundant legacy tools to drive cost savings. The goal is to bring every peripheral system under the New Relic umbrella, ensuring a single, unified source of truth.
