Prioritise the customer experience to gain a competitive edge

09th February 2020

The economic landscape is shifting more rapidly than ever before. As online stores aggressively vie for business in a crowded market amplified by sky-high customer expectations, savvy brands are edging ahead of the pack.

They’re the ones actively embracing the challenges, chasing performance goals and leveraging technology to squeeze out a slim but crucial advantage.
Giving customers what they want is the first rule of retail, although what this looks like in store is oceans away from how it plays out online. Naturally, providing casual browsers with the personalised service that will tempt them to become committed buyers is a priority. But because the quality of the user experience (UX) is so crucial to the online sales conversion process, ensuring your site offers an error-free journey should be your top target.

Performance first

It’s worth reflecting on the cost of undetected performance errors – not just in terms of the immediate impact of lost sales, but also considering the potentially far-reaching consequences of customers who permanently switch their allegiance to a competitor’s website after encountering a temporary glitch on yours.
Experienced online marketers will agree that a consistent, reliable UX is a base level requirement if you want to maximise online sales and have a chance of turning occasional customers into proud evangelists. In practice, this means having the ability to flag and resolve errors and bottlenecks on your site before they start causing customer-facing problems.

Monitoring gains

Round-the-clock performance monitoring is essential. Monitoring your website provides an objective – and invaluable – view of how your website is performing from your visitors’ perspective. And yet, few businesses have the in-house resources to check web performance 24/7.

This is where a managed service comes into its own, pinpointing problems and delivering the data your tech team needs to address the issues that threaten to disrupt the UX. Effectively monitoring site interactions – preferably by accurately replicating real user behaviour – puts you on the front foot, revealing critical issues for even the most complex of sites.

Sophisticated monitoring offers a customer perspective that simply isn’t achievable with self-serve or DIY tools. If you don’t monitor web performance through your customer’s eyes, system errors may easily go unnoticed, exposing your brand to the risks of bad PR.

Taking a logical and thorough approach to monitoring ensures that:

  • You can resolve small niggles before they turn into bottom-line threats
  • You’ll have all the data you need to de-escalate problems quickly, saving you time and money.
  • You can delegate journey scripting and monitoring, leaving your tech team free to focus on development.
  • You’ll be able to extract maximum insight from the data without disrupting your in-house routines.
  • You’ll understand how well your website is performing across a variety of platforms and devices, so you can ensure a fast and frictionless journey for customers, wherever they are.
  • You’ll have the wherewithal to manage third-party services like card processing, checking they are performing to agreed service levels.

Discover how thinkTRIBE’s managed web synthetic monitoring service can help your business maximise ROI.