According to David Rogers, CEO of Qualica Technologies, this is particularly true of organisations that communicate or transact with customers via the Internet. Qualica Technologies is an international provider of optimised network and application services and solutions.
“Far too many businesses make the mistake of thinking that because they have a website that is supposed to make it easier for customers to interact and do business with them, that customers will do just that.
“What they often fail to recognise is that if the customer's experience in using the website is less than pleasant, [the] customer will go elsewhere,” he says.
The problem, Rogers continues, is that the business may be totally unaware that the customer's experience of the website is negative - particularly if the fault lies outside the business's own infrastructure. All the business might be aware of is that customers are abandoning the website prior to completing a transaction.
But they won't know why they are doing this. It could be because the website is downloading unacceptably slowly; or transactions might be timing out or just not being accepted.
A relatively common problem - but one which few organisations are aware of - is that their website can be intermittently inaccessible to some, but not all, customers. If customer care agents are unaware of this, and don't know which customers are affected, the chances are high of losing a customer who takes the trouble to call in and report that the website is ‘down' only to be told by an agent that it isn't.
“Indeed, awareness of a specific problem and apologising to customers for the inconvenience - even if one is unable to take immediate steps to rectify it - can go a long way towards mollifying customers' frustration and tempering their expectations,” Rogers adds.
Qualica's User Experience Management (UEM) technology enables businesses to understand how their website is performing, from the customer's perspective.
In addition, UEM ensures that the source of the problem is clearly pinpointed, and the fault correctly diagnosed, so that time and resources are not wasted when attempting to rectify it.
"Most website faults, particularly poor performance, are attributed to an issue with the website design or application. However it's estimated that 50% of your performance issues could be attributable to problems outside of your own infrastructure - for example on your telco supplier's network, or even with a peering connection.
"Businesses need to know this; they also need to have the facts in hand when approaching a supplier to discuss the problem or when considering upgrading their internal infrastructure to improve performance," he concludes.
