Six steps to delivering better self-service applications. (e-CRM).

The performance of your company's Webbased self-service applications has a growing impact on how much business your customers choose to do with you. As a result, developers, QA engineers and IT operations teams have an unprecedented opportunity to improve their company's bottom line by enhancing customers' quality of experience (QoE).

QoE improvements can have a big impact on profitability, both by accelerating top-line revenue growth and by eliminating unnecessary costs. According to GartnerGroup, a company's cost for a Web self-service transaction is just 24 cents, versus $5.50 for a phone call. However, poorly designed or implemented applications can wreak havoc on the economics behind self service, as frustrated customers are forced to abandon their self-service efforts in favor of higher-cost channels, or worse, your competitors. According to IT research firm The Yankee Group, "If self-service is not done right, the results can be worse than not doing it at all."

Convinced that your customer-facing Web applications already deliver a great experience to your customers? Think again. A recent study on the performance of eight leading bank's self-service applications revealed that Web transaction failure rates were as high as seven percent -- that's one our of every 14 transactions. Chances are there's room for improvement at your company too.

Before you can improve the QoE of your Web applications, you need to understand how they perform right now. After all, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. Here are six simple steps that you can rake immediately to:

* Measure the performance of your Web self-service applications from your customers' perspective,

* See how that performance stacks up against your competitors' applications,

* Understand the variables that you control that determine your customers quality of experience, and

* Focus on the most important, easy-to-fix things that will improve your customers quality of experience.

Step 1: Pick A Critical Transaction

If you're going to measure something, make it important. Pick a Web-based transaction that your customers care about. For a retailer, it may be the ability for a customer to add an item to a shopping cart and pay for it, For a bank, it may be the ability for your customers to look up their account balances. There's no need to pick anything too elaborate; what you really need is a transaction that your customers expect to be able to complete reliably and quickly every time they visit your site.

Step 2: Define Your Competitors

Since you're going to benchmark the performance of this transaction, you need to pick a few competitors that offer self-service Web applications with similar functionality. In order to have an apples-to-apples comparison, make sure the benchmark transaction is as consistent as possible from company to company.

Step 3: Measure The Performance

To make a meaningful evaluation of performance, you need an acceptably large set of data. Over the course of a week or two, measure the performance of your Web apps and those of your competitors by repeatedly trying to execute the benchmark transaction every few minutes during the hours that customers would expect to be able to use the sites. To do this, you'll need an automated testing software or service. Once set up, the automated resting will run with virtually no intervention required on your part.

Step 4: Evaluate The Results

An effective transaction monitoring strategy will yield a rich set of data at the end of your benchmarking period. There are four hard metrics that you can look at to evaluate the quality of experience offered by your Web apps and those of your competitors. In order of importance, they are:

Reliability. What percentage of the attempted transactions failed to go through? If a particular Web page rakes too long to load or if the system is not available or delivers internal errors, then customer QoE is seriously damaged. The best performing Web applications reach the famous Five Nines," or 99.999 percent availability.

Accuracy. Does the application always return the right information? Is the customer always presented with accurate, up-to-date account information? Are the prices and product descriptions correct? If nor, these discrepancies will eventually be uncovered, and will detract from the QoE.

Efficiency. How long does it take for your customers to complete the benchmark transaction at your site? If customers can achieve their goals far more efficiently using a competitors' self-service Web application, you are at a competitive disadvantage.

Consistency. Are your systems able to execute the benchmark transaction in about the same amount of time on a consistent basis? Or are they sometimes blazingly fast and other times agonizingly slow? High levels of transaction length variability undermine customer confidence in your self-service Web applications and may cause them to switch to another vendor. It's nor good enough to provide high-quality service some of the time.

Step 5: Share The Findings

The performance benchmarking information that you have gathered and evaluated can be an enormously powerful tool for building organizational momentum to tackle application performance problems. Once your company understands that its applications are not delivering as good a QoE as those of your competitors, you may find that you have new resources at your disposal to improve the situation.

Keep in mind that there are no magic numbers to shoot for. Customers' tolerance may be higher in some industries than in others. Consider banking, where relationships are established and switching costs are high, versus retail or travel, where it's easy to click to another site to get what you need. Banking customers may be willing to wait 15 seconds for a page to load, where research has shown that in general consumers are only willing to wait for eight seconds before abandoning a site.

Step 6: Connect The Dots

Now that you understand the reasons that your customer-facing Web applications are nor delivering the best possible customer QoE, you can focus your efforts on the highest leverage areas to improve performance. Pay careful attention to areas where your company's performance is significantly behind the competition. By bringing specific information about the nature of customers' experience to the developers, QA engineers and IT operations staff who can enhance application performance, you're now in a position to make teal improvements.

Companies that offer a great customer experience have an important competitive advantage. As the customer experience is increasingly determined by the performance of self-service Web-based applications, smart companies are proactively testing, measuring, managing and improving the quality of experience as a way to differentiate themselves.

Toffer Winslow ([e-mail]) is director of product management for Web application performance testing products for Empirix, Inc. (www.empirix.com). He is also the author of the Empirix Web-Voice Benchmark Report, a study that analyzed the performance of major U.S. banks' customer-facing self-service applications.

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