Retailers Agree: Quality Is Key

Digital transformation is changing the retail game faster than you can click “add to cart.” Competing for both mind and market share, retailers must constantly innovate not only to deliver but also to anticipate the “next best thing.” 

Buying patterns have shifted tremendously over the last few years, with order ahead and buying online and picking up in the store (BOPIS) accounting for $72.5 billion of e-commerce sales in the U.S. in 2020, according to Insider Intelligence. The convenience of this option has combatted any notion that BOPIS is just a fad—with expectations that it will exceed $140 billion of U.S. e-commerce sales by 2024. Many consumers are fed up with shipping costs and delays, making BOPIS an ever-popular option. This increasing demand requires accurate, continuously updated inventory reports and convenient store locators for shoppers. 

The influx of BOPIS sales puts pressure on retailers to improve brick-and-mortar store conditions. As foot traffic increases from online order pickup, the opportunity to make additional sales has retailers scrambling to spruce up store displays and pull out all the bells and whistles. This is a tall order when staffing shortages are their own challenge for the retail community.

With so much on their plates, the last thing retailers need is a network performance issue or service interruption. NETSCOUT’s Smart Edge Monitoring solutions surveil the infrastructure environment and provide real-time insights into user experience (UX), client edges, SaaS application performance, and more so retailers can spend their valuable time putting the customer first.

5 Reasons to Ensure Performance Quality

Here are five reasons to ensure performance quality of retail e-commerce services:

1. Create a positive buyer’s experience. In this saturated market, attracting customers is a feat in itself. Satisfy and retain those customers by ensuring product details are milliseconds away, their shopping cart is always filled with in-stock items, and checkout is swift. NETSCOUT’s network and application performance management solutions monitor the network and identify the root cause of slowdowns to provide IT teams with the metrics and details to remediate issues—often before customers are even affected. 
2. Get ahead of supply chain issues. Repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic are unavoidable for retailers wrestling with supply and demand. Proactively detect service degradations that impact inventory and manufacturing to assure customers have unimpeded access to inventory status and delivery timelines so they can make the best shopping decisions. 
3. Customer support means everything. When things go left, count on customer service to make them right again. Set your customer service team up for success by protecting call quality. Contact centers are crucial in today’s digital world, and NETSCOUT’s custom dashboards and reports relay real-time insights by continuously monitoring the user experience. 
4. Understand root cause quickly. To ensure maximum uptimes for all connected systems, identifying root cause efficiently is key. Critical applications and services often rely on one another. NETSCOUT helps reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) by triaging service-affecting disruptions and helping organizations prioritize issues and corrective actions based on evidence provided in NETSCOUT solutions. 
5. Make the most of your investment. You can’t put a price tag on smooth operations—but you may have tried. Deloitte reports that 58 percent of technology budget for consumer business and retail businesses was spent aiming to improve business operations in 2020. NETSCOUT network and application performance management solutions aim to support that investment and certify peak performance.

Learn more about how assuring quality performance and availability positively impacts retail service.