No More Guesswork: A Better Way to Measure, Understand and Improve the Online Customer Experience

white paper No More Guesswork: A Better wAy to MeAsure, uNderstANd ANd IMprove the oNlINe CustoMer experIeNCe suMMer 2007 Executive Summary Great companies of all kinds work hard to provide an excellent customer experience. Leading Web companies are no different, but the technology they need to monitor experience levels online has been slow to develop and frequently flawed. Fortunately, a new approach to understanding the online customer experience is now available. Utilizing a method that monitors the user experience from inside the browser, this technology promises to help companies: • Analyze the actual experience of specific customers and segments, and understand which buyer segments have poor performance and why; • Know which variables on a company’s website contribute to (or detract from) a favor- able customer experience, including third party content providers, use of multiple browsers, and rich media types; and • Make better decisions as to what Web components to monitor and improve by ana- lyzing performance in the way that matters most – as users experience it from inside their browsers. This white paper will help business and IT managers learn how browser tools work to document the customer experience, enabling managers to take proactive steps to increase revenue, reduce risk, and improve customer satisfaction. whIte pAper No More Guesswork: A Better way to Measure, understand and Improve the online Customer experience Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 3 Three Passive Approaches............................................................................................................... 4 A Closer Look at Browser-Based Monitoring ............................................................................... 4 Combining Active and Passive Monitoring.................................................................................. 7 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 8 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 informa- tion 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. © 2007 Gomez, Inc. All rights reserved. Gomez, Actual Experience XF, the Gomez ExperienceFirst Platform, 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. 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. 10 Maguire Rd, Lexington, MA 02421-3119 www.gomez.com T: 781.778.2700 F: 781.778.2799 whIte pAper No More Guesswork: A Better way to Measure, understand and Improve the online Customer experience Introduction Top retail stores and leading service providers like banks and other businesses have long realized the critical need to provide a superior customer experience. So it’s not surprising that with so much business shifting to the Web, the need to better understand the customer experience online is growing fast, too. Business managers closest to the customer are looking for ways to capture specific information about how real people interact with – or experience -- their websites and site services. Armed with this information, they can: • Reduce the time it takes to understand the scope and impact of performance-related issues on customers; A Major Source of Downtime • Validate third party provider effectiveness with an unbiased view; “Application performance is one of the major sources of downtime and • Better understand the customer’s experience of Web 2.0 rich media sites; and brownouts, as well as the most • Make better decisions as to what to monitor and improve. difficult problem to resolve...Resolving these issues in production by throwing Ultimately, of course, they want to champion incremental improvements that provide an hardware at them is the most costly excellent customer experience. This in turn will drive greater revenues, increased profits, brand and ineffective approach possible. loyalty, and repeat online business for their organizations. More often than not, it will have the technology in transition. Rapid technology changes make it difficult for IT to keep up with effect of aspirin on a broken leg: the data demands. Today’s sites are a daunting mix of distributed architectures, application temporary relief, at best.” accelerators, smart clients/fat browsers, and third party content. This complexity renders —Forrester Research many traditional and more centralized measurement techniques useless for capturing the real customer experience. Many of the Web 2.0 browser components that make a site compelling – AJAX, Flash animation, and Flex to name a few -- are particularly difficult to monitor using the centralized server tools familiar to most IT shops. Fortunately, newer tools now available are specifically designed to measure (and ultimately improve) the customer experience. The purpose of this white paper is to understand how these “passive technologies” work to solve the monitoring problems identified in the Web 2.0 world and how they differ from “active” or “synthetic” monitoring tools. It also explores the benefits of combining both testing techniques to better understand the relationship between performance and the customer experience. three passive Approaches The need for business to understand the customer experience is driving interest in passive monitoring today. And for good reason: passive techniques are effective at helping organizations better serve their customers. Three types of passive monitoring technologies are currently available. They are: 1. hardware-based appliances. These devices work by reconstructing user sessions from traffic at the switch. While hardware devices, or “sniffers,” are fine for monitoring the user experience of a simple site delivered from a single domain, they cannot measure outside service providers. Nor can appliances measure the user experience from inside the browser itself.