 "72% CIOs Say They Are Not Alerted On Issues With Web Services")
Research has shown that even minor delays to website response times can have a sizable impact on customer satisfaction, page views, conversion rates and site abandonment. Despite this, an astonishing percentage of organisations (32 percent) do not or don’t know if their website is monitored on a 24x7 basis. That’s according to an independent global research study undertaken by Vanson Bourne and commissioned by Borland, a Micro Focus company.
Proving that many organisations still haven’t got the basics covered since the birth of first generation websites in the mid 1990s, a shocking 26 percent of CIOs from 590 organisations across the globe admitted they are not or don’t know if they are monitoring response times for mission-critical transactions. These include transactions such as shopping cart and database record retrieval on their websites. Financial services, retail and media, leisure and entertainment companies all confess to poor figures given they would typically have large scale e-commerce transactions, with 23 percent, 24 percent and 25 percent respectively.
80 percent risk customer experience and satisfaction
When it comes to trouble-shooting:
72 percent of respondents confirmed they are not always alerted at the first sign of a problem on their web services
80 percent are not always able to resolve a problem on their web services before a customer becomes aware of it. From a sector perspective, media, leisure and entertainment companies and financial services organisations are the worst culprits, with 90 percent and 87 percent respectively
The situation is even worse for web apps on mobile
34 percent of CIOs are not tracking how quickly their own website loads on mobile devices and 36 percent are not tracking how quickly their web application loads on mobile devices
That’s despite the research respondents confirming they would only wait an average of seven seconds before abandoning a website due to lack of responsiveness
Testing and preparing for heavy traffic peaks is poor
Although 79 percent of CIOs are conscious of the events that drive peak traffic volumes, such as seasonal events or holiday periods, 44 percent do not simulate website performance with heavy load testing to see if they can handle the increased pressure on their websites. This is compounded by a communication breakdown between marketing and IT departments:
69 percent of CIOs are not made aware of their marketing department plans well ahead of schedule, which means they can’t plan for and test to ensure optimum website performance
73 percent of respondents are not always made aware of specific launches before they happen
Archie Roboostoff, Borland Solutions Portfolio Director, Micro Focus said, “Users have very little truck with poor performing websites today so these insights are pretty astonishing. 88 percent of online visitors are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience so taking a passive approach to website performance is a massive risk to reputation, and for e-commerce sites, revenue too. It just goes to show that a solid performing website is still a competitive advantage, and that any company delivering an equally good web experience on mobile is likely to win the customer retention and acquisition battle.”
Nitin Dang, Country General Manager, Micro Focus, India and SAARC said, “With the patience level of consumers declining with each step forward in technology, it is now becoming vital for businesses to ensure they test their websites on multiple platforms. With the trend demanding online presence, putting in the groundwork for robust performance is crucial to offer a rich and seamless experience the customers and in turn take full advantage of peak shopping periods through the year. The Silk product set are an easy to use, full functional set of interfaces (clients), which enables you to perform automated functional testing in a variety of development environments and programming languages. They are an efficient, cost-effective way to ensure your mission-critical applications meet performance expectations and service-level requirements.”
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