In short, yes. Given the importance of online and multi-channel customer experiences and with increased competition and high customer expectations, round the clock, objective visibility of your website’s performance and resulting customer experience is essential.
In order to understand the bottom-line impact of undetected performance errors, it’s worth considering the long-term business implications. For instance, how much would an online glitch cost your organisation in straight sales – or in customers switching their allegiance to competitors? Only last week, John Lewis’s website was down for over four hours, seriously undermining the expensive media fanfare around the launch of their new partnership campaign with Waitrose.
A consistent, reliable UX is the key to keeping customers on-side, which means it’s crucial that website owners are immediately alerted to performance issues and that tech teams have swift access to the data they need to resolve them. And yet, few businesses can afford to dedicate in-house resources to checking the performance of their sites 24/7.
A managed service is the ideal solution. Monitoring your website enables you to have an objective, consistent view of how your website is performing from your visitors’ perspective, giving you the confidence and assurance that users will not encounter problems in the live site. But how do managed services further maximise your ROI?
1. Maximising customer experience and online conversions
With a managed web monitoring service, you instantly extend your team with proactive, experienced performance experts. They know what to look for in your data, how to action performance issues and how to prioritise them, depending on whether or not they impact your customers. This not only enables your tech team to get straight to work on the issues that have the biggest impact on your bottom line but also returns the best customer experience – in turn, maximising conversions and reducing abandonment.
2. Safeguarding your brand
A managed service gives you the ability to monitor more complex technology and site interactions. The most realistic monitoring replicates real user behaviour – something that simply isn’t achievable with self-serve or DIY tools. When businesses don’t monitor website performance in the same way that users experience a site, system errors can go unnoticed, directly impacting ROI.
A managed service approach results in more thorough, reliable testing that will uncover all your critical issues for even the most complex of sites, safeguarding your brand, protecting customer loyalty and minimising the risks of bad PR.
3. Resolve small problems before they become big issues
A proactive, independent team member keeping an eye on your monitoring journeys means performance issues come to light before they escalate, giving you the precise information you need to handle problems before they become more damaging and more expensive to resolve – saving you time and money.
4. Free up tech team resources
There’s no need for your tech team to spend precious time scripting new monitoring journeys or maintaining them following changes to your site. With a managed service you’ll have a team taking care of your scripting, freeing your tech team to focus their efforts on developing new features for your website.
Discover how a managed, cloud-based monitoring solution delivers all of this whilst maximising insight and minimising disruption to your team and services. No software to install and no staff to train, saving you time and money.