Web performance and the customer experience
Adrian Abrate
We all know that customer experience is important. Every time a customer interacts with an organisation, a perception is formed based on that experience. Your brand reputation is primarily based on these types of interactions, which can include interaction with staff in-store or on the phone, your brand's social media presence, and even how a customer interacts with a corporate website.
It's this last point that I want to talk about; specifically the importance of a well planned Web performance strategy for your business to prevent loss in brand reputation.
So why do you need to have a formal Web performance strategy? When you are armed with the proper data you can form a plan to improve your customer's experience as they interact with your brand online. Prevention is generally always better than cure — rebuilding a brand image after a major outage or poor performing site launch is much more expensive than preventing it from happening in the first place.
Even if you don't transact via your website, a poor customer experience online can lead to a negative impact on the general perception of your business to the public.
I can think of several recent examples where a major brand suffered from bad press after failing to consider a Web performance strategy prior to launching a major marketing campaing or system.
• Dr Pepper 'free can' promotion. In 2008 Dr Pepper ran a promotion to give away 300 million cans of soft drink if the new Guns N' Roses album, Chinese Democracy, was released by the end of the year. Well it was released in time, Dr Pepper traffic spiked and the site promptly went down.
• London 2012 Olympics. An infamous example of a poorly designed and tested system. The ticketing systems were plagued with performance issues. Initially the ticket ballot system suffered and later the ticket trading system ground to a halt like a broken-down rollercoaster.
These types of problems could easily have been avoided and planned for if a holistic approach to Web performance had been considered.
So what should you include as part of your strategy? I recommend you initially approach three primary elements with your team to start implementing an effective Web performance strategy.
• Load testing. Load testing ensures that your site is ready for any unplanned spikes in traffic. With social media playing such a large factor in traffic today it helps to know your website's 'limits'. Further planning for seasonal changes in traffic also ensures you don't lose revenue or reputation during important peak seasons.
• Website monitoring. A modern website monitoring solution is more than a piece of software polling a website and alerting you if the site goes down. Effective website monitoring will alert you to small gradual decreases in performance before a major issue arises, enabling your team to remedy a potentially unwanted situation.
• Web performance analysis. Web performance analysis enables you to identify areas on your site's front-end that can be optimised for performance improvements. Many studies show that improvements made to site load times help lower site bounce rates and increase conversion rates.
Talk about these three metrics the next time you sit with your digital team. A proactive approach will result in you identifying or avoiding problems as they form, improving performance and reinforcing a positive customer experience of quality, speed and reliability.
Adrian Abrate is the founder of Pogospring.com, a Sydney-based business and technology blog.