Egham, Surrey, 7th March 2011 – A survey at the Travel Technology Europe (TTE) exhibition in early February has revealed that 99% of the travel industry’s senior management, IT, sales and marketing executives believe that the performance of online services is crucial to economic growth in 2011. The survey, conducted for XML services analytics provider, Triometric, showed that half of businesses (54%) said it was critical, 32% thought it to be very important and 13% quite important to growth.
Respondents were asked to rate the potential implications of downtime or delays to a website, XML services or extranet. More than three quarters (78%) of respondents cited loss of revenue as the biggest concern while increased volume of calls to the helpdesk or customer service centre (53%) and negative impact on the team/department (45%) were also of great unease.
Jonathan Boffey, Business Development Director at real user monitoring software company, Triometric explains, “Most travel companies rely on a website, XML services or extranet to conduct profitable business. This survey shows that in 2011, the web will continue to stimulate economic growth, however, these businesses could face large revenue losses if they are not able to monitor performance down to customer transactional level. Besides improving response times and uptime, this level of monitoring gives visibility over both customer experience and behaviour.”
Of attendees surveyed, the majority (83%) felt that visibility of the customer experience would add value to their business. However 41% do not use a web performance monitoring product that provides actionable information on actual client experience and activity.
Almost one third of respondents (31%) spend 70% or more of their problem resolution time in root cause analysis as opposed to fixing it. A further quarter (25%) estimated that they spend between 60% and 70% of their time looking for problems whilst the remaining group that specified an estimate (39%) claimed to spend less than 60% of their time looking for problems as opposed to fixing them.
“While the time spent looking for the cause of a problem is frequently underestimated, it is easy to see that being able to identify a problem quickly rather than having to spend time, resource and budget looking for it in the first place, means more profitability for a business,” said Boffey. “This survey demonstrates that a web and web services diagnostic solution would add value to nearly all on-line travel businesses.”
Consumer experience will be the focus of this year’s innovative IT spend according to a debate at the TTE exhibition. This justifies the emphasis that GTA Travelport, a world leader in the provision of ground travel products and services to the travel trade industry, places on improved response times, content relevance and adaptability to consumer demands. Using Triometric’s Web Anaylzer, GTA Travelport has improved web service response times by 800% as well as acquiring invaluable BI on consumer experience.
Chris Anders, Director of IT Operations at GTA Travelport explains “Extracting information about all the requests that our clients send to us gives us invaluable information into our client and consumer base. We are also working with Triometric to provide us with a continuous real-time monitoring feed of our search traffic. Real time availability of this information is essential to making sure that we can remain competitive in the industry.”
Triometric’s Web Analyzer is used to monitor high value XML services and web traffic. It has a unique ability to report right down to transactional level, crucial for managing global web performance, providing business intelligence on consumer experience (through XML content analysis), aiding capacity planning and enabling other business processes such as dynamic pricing.
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