See What The User Sees, Experience What The User Experiences 24x7 on Your Site
As we adapt to a customer centric world that offers huge choice at the click of a button, customer service and brand experience have become one of the most important differentiators between otherwise similar products and services.
Website availability monitoring is no longer a simple technical or operational verification test. It is about impact on the bottom line of every business that has an online presence. It is about opportunity cost, the value of lost sales, the potential of lost leads, perception of customer service and user experience and brand management in social media.
You have to experience the site as a customer to understand the site as a customer - and not just once at launch, in User Acceptance Testing (UAT) or with usability test groups once every few months. You need to ensure that the experience users are having on your site is perfect and consistent from minute to minute to minute.
Lost sales are avoidable by using thorough methodologies to provide you with the full picture of your website performance. Only by using a 'Dynamic User Journey' approach can your technical and marketing teams gain crucial insights and information about your customers' real online experience.
Dynamic User Journeys
The way we understand and interact with websites has become more sophisticated and as a result the technology behind the scenes has also developed rapidly. For this reason it is important to ensure you have the correct website monitoring service which can cope with the technological complexities behind your website.
Traditional monitoring, which draws a 'customer journey' by checking a fixed number of URLs, no longer works. The journey may show an OK response: but as this approach does not 'Do What the Customer Does' by side-stepping complex code experienced by the user, the results provide an obvious false sense of security.
It's important that your testing approach works happily alongside modern coding practices including complexities such as the latest AJAX and RIA usage. Because Users Journeys are not URL based, they will not follow a pre-cooked URL list. Instead, at each step of a User Journey, the technology looks into the page and dynamically pulls out what is needed thus simulating real customer interaction.
For a vast number of organisations websites are now a common sales and marketing channel bringing substantial financial contributions. However the continuous development of social media on the internet, escalating technological complexities, alongside increasingly fierce competition in the digital market place has made website testing critical to maintaining a competitive position.
"46% of adults reported they would abandon a transaction after experiencing a problem on a web site"
When businesses do not monitor website performance, system errors can go unnoticed directly impacting company ROI. By its nature, online shopping allows users to switch between sites and brands very easily. This allows
dissatisfied customers to 'walk away' at a click of a mouse - often, to sites they may not have heard of before.
Online service delivery and customer experience is perhaps more critical than any other shopping outlet due to the fickle nature of online confidence. To truly understand your website performance, and which technical issues are most disruptive to an end user, it is imperative to test from the customer's perspective. With a User Journey monitor approach
and Dynamic User Journey Testing on your site, confidence will grow in your ability to remove obstacles to your users.
By Deri Jones, CEO of SciVisum.
SciVisum is offering a free eBook - 'Meeting the challenges of modern website performance'
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