Web functionality: how do you ensure new features don’t negatively impact the CX?

The events of the last year have presented businesses with a plethora of challenges and opportunities – not least the imperative to engage more successfully with customers online as more of us work and shop from home.

Keeping the customer satisfied

For many brands, delivering a consistently satisfying customer experience (CX) has become pivotal to growth. A recent article from Forbes exploring the management of customer expectations summarised the dilemma in a nutshell: ‘patience for friction is at an all-time low while digital interactions are reaching record heights’.

In this febrile digital landscape, interactions that fall below expectations not only disappoint in the short term but can result in business lost forever.

And yet, sustaining high levels of satisfaction is tricky. The infrastructure needed to meet rapidly evolving customer expectations is significant – and must be ready to scale and adapt as required.

However, even where brands prioritise the CX, they still need to accept there’s likely to be a gap between the customer’s perception and objective reality: a recent comparative study pitting business achievements against customer expectations found that consumers rated their experiences at a lower level across a number of key metrics. Expectations were particularly high in businesses with omnichannel services.

Introducing changes without losing business

Maintaining optimal CX becomes more difficult with every new feature you introduce or piece of code you update. But when change is the new constant, it’s easy to see how tiny glitches can grow into customer-impacting issues.
So, how can you make sure that enhancing your web content and functionality doesn’t adversely impact the CX?

• Load testing. The only way to understand your site’s actual capacity is by load testing to degradation or failure. Not via a system focused on concurrent users but one that creates a realistic mix of users based on actual traffic patterns.
• In-depth analysis. This data will provide important insights about how different behaviour impacts your web provision and, importantly, will have the information you need to accurately assess how your site responds to high traffic.
• Benchmarking. Schedule load testing ahead of each major release to use as a go/no-go indicator before putting the change into production. This will help you understand whether or not a change has impacted performance or capacity.

Consult the experts

At thinkTRIBE we use testing protocols that are based on real user traffic data to provide a better overview of what users are doing, including the devices they’re using, the routes they’re following and their ‘drop-off’ ratios. A load test that replicates traffic to a 98 percent accuracy level is the single most effective way of ensuring users will enjoy unhindered progress through your site.

Our managed services free up your technical team to focus on delivering the best CX – we can also respond quickly and effectively to urgent requests for business-critical testing and monitoring services. If you’d like a rapid response to your performance issues – and the benefit of 15 years’ worth of experience gained working with the UK’s largest brands – get in touch today.