Deloitte’s annual Holiday Survey of Consumers found that online is king when it comes to the 2019 holiday shopping season. According to the report, consumers of all ages are more likely to rely on Cyber Monday than Black Friday and expect to spend nearly 60% of their holiday budget online. Given eCommerce’s popularity these findings aren’t terribly surprising, however, they underscore that online retailers cannot afford any downtime or performance glitches when Cyber Monday dawns.
Eggplant Blog
“The collapse of Thomas Cook, one of the most high-profile company failures in the history of the travel industry, will be pored over by analysts for years to come.” This according to an article by PhocusWire’s Kevin May but it’s a sentiment shared by countless other media members, Thomas Cook employees, and the 150,000 people stranded by the company’s disintegration.
In a recent Eggplant survey on retail trends it was apparent that companies are facing some common challenges in delivering a high-quality digital experience. Nearly every retailer we surveyed recognizes the importance of evaluating how the user experience impacts business outcomes, yet 30% have a drop off rate of 50% or more on online properties.
On July 23, 2019, Antony Edwards, COO of Eggplant, and Diego Lo Giudice, VP Principal Analyst at Forrester, conducted a webinar on “Putting Intelligence into your Continuous Testing.”
If you ask the average CEO to rate how important digital transformation is to their business, chances are it would crack the top five—if not take the number one spot. After all, a recent Gartner survey found that IT spending will reach $3.85 trillion this year with enterprise software continuing to be the fastest-growing category.
Poor customer experience is costing financial institutions $10 billion in revenue annually, according to an industry report released earlier this year. It’s a staggering figure that underscores how critical it is for financial services firms to delight their customers at every interaction. But, when you consider the industry’s complex, highly regulated environment and the customer expectation for a seamless experience across devices and operating systems, it’s clear that this is anything but a simple task.
Quality. It’s what everyone involved in designing, building, testing, and maintaining software strives to deliver. And it was very much the common thread running through our inaugural Eggplanet conference in London on 6 June.
Billed as the event where continuous quality meets business outcomes and, thanks to an inspiring group of speakers and wonderfully engaged delegates, it didn’t disappoint.
A surge in traffic is in many ways a dream for any website. After all, more traffic means more customers and more sales.
However, you can sometimes do your job too well when your successful marketing campaign brings surges of traffic, causing your website or app to slow down and even crash. There’s nothing more heartbreaking than seeing your website or app fail just when you have the most to gain.
Most blogs and articles just state traffic-induced crashes as something that can happen. But if you don’t understand how high traffic crashes a website or app, how can you expect to avoid the problem?
In a recent Forbes interview on the retail customer experience, Harley Manning, VP and research director of Forrester’s customer experience team, said; “Customer expectations are rising slowly—but faster than brands are making improvements.” He further elaborated that the average score in the firm’s CX Index™ for US digital retailers decreased from the prior year, with no retailer breaking through the 85th percentile to make it into the “excellent” category.
Today’s complex, digital world relies on computer systems and software and downtime is more than an inconvenience—in many industries, it’s a critical failure that can have a lasting, negative impact on customer experience, the corporate brand and the bottom line.