Riverbed Retail Therapy Week comment

Wimpie van Rensburg

Shoppers demand a reliable, time-effective experience. When this expectation is not met, they feel frustrated, resulting in negative repercussions on retailers’ brand trust, reputation and bottom line. Retailers therefore need to adopt an holistic approach to improving the buying journey in order to ensure a seamless customer experience across all relevant channels, including stores, websites, and apps.

Given the increasing number of people shopping online, retailers must focus on providing shoppers with a consistent virtual experience, including fast website performance and access to data across multiple devices, such as cellphones, laptops and tablets. Shoppers do not always have an enjoyable online journey, especially during peak periods. This is often because retailers have been unprepared for the spike in website traffic, caused by the increased volume of shoppers visiting their sites.

Network performance issues

Website failures are often a result of a number of network performance issues, such as poor change management, denial of service attacks, or simply lack of capacity on the hosting platform. If a company doesn’t have the monitoring and diagnostics systems in place to detect where the issues lie, it can take much longer to resolve and have the website back online as normal. The immediate effects may be back-end problems that cannot be resolved quickly, and, as a result, application performance suffers.

To mitigate this issue, retailers should consider using technology that allows them to detect, analyse, and fix any network and application performance problems quickly before they have an impact on business revenue. This is especially important for companies with a hybrid IT infrastructure – whereby applications are deployed in multiple data centres and accessed from various locations, increasing the complications around performance management.

Business-critical applications need to be available and responsive, providing end-to-end visibility, regardless of where and when they are being accessed. In times when online shopping is the norm, it’s vital to look to and deploy solutions that can provide a consolidated view and will provide useful insights that can maximise customer loyalty and minimise network and performance issues. Failure to do so will only result in disgruntled shoppers and empty pockets.

Speed, reliability and ease of use are major priorities for shoppers. Retailers must look after all three if they wish to create a growing, loyal customer base over time.