If you're new to Cheap Hosting Directory, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

San Mateo, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–July 7, 2005–Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN):

— Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble Provide Best Online Customer Experience, L.L. Bean in Third Place

– Williams-Sonoma and WalMart Provide Best Online Service Levels, Eddie Bauer in Third Place

– Barnes and Noble Provides Customers Top Search and Product Research Functions

– WalMart Built to Handle High User Loads

New competitive intelligence from Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority(R), reports the online retail industry provides visually descriptive Web pages that meet customer expectations, but at times offset optimal speed and reliability.

The results of two companion studies indicate that retailers which deliver detailed product information and graphics, organization and navigation, price satisfaction and search capabilities provide the best experience in the Keynote Customer Experience Rankings for Retail Web Sites. The accompanying study, Keynote Service Level Rankings for Retail, indicates that although retail Web sites are among the most reliable in the online industry, many experience long load times and falter during the final purchase process.

The Keynote studies evaluated the Web sites of the following online shopping sites (not all of the sites were included in both studies): Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Best Buy, BUY.com, Circuit City, Costco, Dell, Crate and Barrel, eBay, Eddie Bauer, Gap, JCPenney, L.L. Bean, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Office Depot, Overstock.com, Staples, Target, WalMart, Williams-Sonoma, and Yahoo! Shopping.

”The retail industry has succeeded in providing descriptive product Web sites, but their transaction performance falls short of expectations,” commented Chris Loosley, general manager, service level business for Keynote. ”It was surprising to find that several of the sites had major load related issues, a result of detailed page designs, and did not easily facilitate the checkout process. These are critical flaws that can greatly impact customer loyalty. To compete, retailers need to improve their ability to manage both customer experience and service level performance.”

————————————————–
Keynote Service Level Rankings
————————————————–
1 Williams-Sonoma
—- ———————————————
2 WalMart
—- ———————————————
3 Eddie Bauer
—- ———————————————

Williams-Sonoma, WalMart and Eddie Bauer were the three best performing sites reported by Keynote’s service level rankings, a deep diagnostic evaluation of the service level performance of leading retail sites. Superior network connectivity and the most consistent response times helped Williams-Sonoma lead the rankings. WalMart lead in the load handling index with almost no slowdown as user load increased, indicating the site is well-built to handle heavy future load. No single site dominated the study’s findings.

Keynote also publishes a public e-commerce index that measures the transaction response time and reliability of leading retail sites week over week.

During the in-depth Keynote service level ranking study, conducted from May 7 - June 3, the company found many of the sites evaluated reported significant outage hours. In addition, the study showed that the critical checkout process is the least reliable online shopping activity.

”Online retail is unique compared to other e-commerce industries due to the amount of content their Web sites need to offer consumers,” said Dr. Bonny Brown, director of research and public services for Keynote. ”Our market intelligence demonstrates that the visual appeal of online retail Web sites is equal in impact to price satisfaction for consumers considering an online purchase. The industry appears to be sacrificing speed and reliability to provide visually appealing Web pages.”

————————————————–
Keynote Customer Experience Rankings
————————————————–
1 Amazon.com
—- ———————————————
2 Barnes and Noble
—- ———————————————
3 L.L. Bean
—- ———————————————

Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and L.L. Bean were the three best performing sites reported by Keynote’s customer experience rankings, an in-depth evaluation of the customer experience provided by leading retail sites. Amazon.com stood out due to strong visual appeal, easy purchase process, search and product research. In addition to price satisfaction and eye-catching graphics, ease of use and convenience are the primary drivers for online shopping. Consumers are more likely to conduct a transaction if a site meets these needs.

Barnes and Noble continues to lead the retail industry in its ability to generate interest in its products and in providing strong search capabilities, and also leapt to the top of the industry in terms of delivering leading product research functions. The site also showed considerable improvement in the ease of use of its purchase process. L.L. Bean was the leader in terms of ease of use of the purchase process, and was also a leader in the search category.

To benchmark leading online retail sites in customer experience, the Keynote Customer Experience Rankings examined 2,000 consumers as they interacted with the leading sites, capturing more than 250 behavioral and attitudinal data points for each consumer. The Keynote Service Level Rankings examined service levels at leading retail sites, testing speed and reliability by running 5,000 simulated transactions on each site.

Keynote’s Web transaction performance indices are weekly measurements that show the total execution time and success rate for logging into an account, searching for an item, adding it to the shopping cart, and proceeding to check out on selected Internet retail sites. Keynote’s most recent e-commerce index can be found at: http://www.keynote.com/solutions/performance_indices/ecommerce/ecommerce.html.

The studies, the Keynote Customer Experience Rankings for Retail Web Sites and the Keynote Service Level Rankings for Retail Web Sites, which may be purchased together or separately, provide in-depth competitive analysis of the online retail industry and contain hundreds of additional data points and a detailed analysis of study findings. For more information about the full reports or to purchase the reports, visit:

– Keynote Customer Experience Rankings for Online Retail Sites: http://www.keynote.com/sbl_forms/ce_retail.html

– Keynote Service Level Rankings for Online Retail Sites: http://www.keynote.com/sbl_forms/sl_retail.html

Keynote Systems provides a full range of measurement and monitoring, service level and customer experience management services. Keynote’s competitive intelligence studies provide insights into online retail trends and service level and customer experience competitive benchmarks of leading online retail sites.

Customer Experience Management

Keynote is the leading provider of customer experience management (CEM) services, offering both competitive intelligence studies and custom engagement services examining consumer attitudes and behavior on the Web. Keynote’s customer experience management services provide critical business insight into online customer experiences, industry trends and competitive Web strategies for a variety of vertical industries. In addition to traditional opinion data, Keynote’s proprietary customer experience technology and access to a pool of 160,000+ panelists allows for the collection of detailed qualitative and behavioral data that inform its reports.

Keynote Customer Experience (CE) Rankings are available for a number of industries including the retail, banking and credit card industries, as well as several travel verticals, including the airline, cruise and rental car industries.

To learn more about Keynote’s competitive intelligence offerings and for a list of the various vertical industry reports that are available, visit: http://www.keynote.com/solutions/cem_syndicated_research.html.

Service Level Management

Keynote’s service level management (SLM) solutions provide enterprises with the tools to align IT and e-business goals. Keynote’s SLM solution suites offer a comprehensive approach to the problem of managing e-business service levels effectively for IT, for application deployment and support personnel and for e-business executives.

To learn more about Keynote’s SLM solutions visit: http://www.keynote.com/solutions/service_level_management.html.

About Keynote
Founded in 1995, Keynote Systems (Nasdaq ”KEYN”), The Internet Performance Authority(R), is the worldwide leader in e-business performance management services. Over 2,100 corporate IT departments and 16,000 individual subscribers rely on Keynote’s growing range of measurement and monitoring, service level and customer experience management services to improve e-business performance by reducing costs, improving customer satisfaction and increasing profitability.

Keynote is viewed as The Internet Performance Authority due to the company’s global infrastructure of over 1,600 measurement computers in more than 50 cities worldwide that capture and store on a daily basis over 60 million Internet performance measurements, frequent media citations quoting Keynote’s Web performance data and analysis, the company’s market-leading Web performance indices for vertical markets and leading customer research that provides critical business insight into online customer experiences, industry trends and competitive Web strategies.

Keynote Systems, Inc. is headquartered in San Mateo, California and can be reached at www.keynote.com or by phone in the U.S. at (650) 403-2400.

Keynote, The Internet Performance Authority and Perspective are registered trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. (C) 2005 Keynote Systems, Inc.

 

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.