10 PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT BEST PRACTICES

Best Practices 10 PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT BEST PRACTICES Whether shopping for a sweater at a major department store , making a plane reservation through a call center, or checking an account balance with a teller at your local bank, your customer experience is very important. So, is this any different for online customers? Hardly. But believe it or not, some of the best-known companies in the world have mastered and maximized, measured and manipulated their offline environments on a quest for maximum results, but have missed the point with their online channels. As different as the online world may seem by comparison, a fundamental truth remains exactly the same: if you make products and services hard to find, hard to buy, or create a poor shopping environment, customers won’t buy. In the early days of the Internet, being just about the only game in town transcended the importance of factors like the customer’s experience… at least for a while. Fast forward to now and it’s apparent that there are lots of places to shop. Also, in an incredibly short span of time, online buyers have matured. They have had enough online experiences to form discriminating value judgments about your brand and quality, often on the basis of your Web site and, usually in a matter of a few seconds. The reality for many companies today is that the fastest growing channel and the best way to improve margins is the Internet. That said, all too frequently, companies acquiesce to subjective self-assessments or anecdotal evidence that their Web site is better or worse than another. Internet performance leaders are more demanding than this. They expect the same superior performance of their online channel as they do of their call center or in-store channels. They go well beyond the usual performance criteria—availability and response time—and turn their attention to also delivering consistency for users in different locations and with different connections. They examine additional components of the entire end-user-facing business processes that are key to a positive online customer experience. These leaders want to ensure that their products can be found, seen, reserved, carted, and easily purchased quickly and enjoyably—every time. “What is a performance management culture? Simply put, it's a state of mind—a way of doing business that’s all about vigilant monitoring of your site’s performance to ensure a consistently positive user experience, whether the user is log- ging on from Paris or San Francisco. It’s about always measuring your site’s performance against your competi- tors’. It's about continual learning to safeguard customers, brand reputation and the bottom line.” Matt Poepsel BEST PRACTICES 10 Performance Management Best Practices The information contained in this document represents the current view of Gomez, Inc. on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Gomez must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Gomez, and Gomez or its respective suppliers cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication. This white paper is for informational purposes only. GOMEZ AND ITS RESPECTIVE SUPPLIERS MAKE NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Gomez, Inc. Gomez may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Gomez, the furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights or other intellectual property. © 2006 Gomez, Inc. All rights reserved. Gomez and the Gomez logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Gomez, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Gomez, Inc. , 420 Bedford Street, Lexington, MA 02420 USA This document contains information of a proprietary nature. All information contained herein shall be kept in confidence and shall be for the original recipient’s use only. Any unauthorized reproduction by any other party shall constitute an infringement of copyright. 2 Gomez, Inc. 420 Bedford Street, Lexington, MA 02420 www.gomez.com T: 781.778.2700 F: 781.778.2799 BEST PRACTICES 10 Performance Management Best Practices Bringing it all together All of this brings us full circle to the fundamentals of commerce: how is customer loyalty secured, how is the shopping experience optimized, and what can be done to make the entire process more efficient? Surprisingly, the answers are fairly simple. And yet, these practices are not well-known or routinely implemented online. Why? Because in some cases, even the most well known brands don’t realize that these solutions exist. In some cases, they claim their online site is competitively appropriate because it ‘looks’ like other sites in their sector. And, in other cases, these logical performance practices are rejected because they would actually force organizations to align separate internal groups that generally have a hard time endorsing a set of shared measurement and maximization metrics. These groups are so busy working against each other that they can’t find time to work together. Employing the following performance practices may represent the best chance for any organization—regardless of its size and market presence—to gain alignment and win more than its fair share of the online market opportunity. 1. Know Your Strengths … and Weaknesses For years, companies have looked to their competitors’ stores to benchmark themselves. Routine walk-throughs can be very illuminating but, in the online world, it’s still rare to find organizations that routinely ‘take a walk’ through a competitor’s site from a performance perspective. In the absence of empirical comparisons, how can you know whether your online store performs better than a competitor’s store or whether it lags the pack? Today’s benchmarking technologies enable any company to easily quantify where its site ranks against competitors, understand gaps, and take steps to improve. Smart companies benchmark early and often. 2.