Is the website down today?

Ever had the call: 'Is the website down, today?' perhaps after one or two complaints to the call centre team or from Customer Support or Sales.

Often, nothing seems broken, nothing has crashed and your team are left feeling frustrated that a few customers with poorly configured PCs get more respect from the customer service team than the organisation's own technical team.

Maybe you've tried adding some more system logging and monitoring already, you've looked for hints of a problem - CPU load, homepage response, database queues, pages/minute being served or server processes frozen. But these server-based measures don't help when the next call from customer service comes in. Worst of all, they might assume that 'there's no smoke without fire' and that your technology team are just not providing a good web experience.

To break this spiral of misunderstanding, to regain the confidence of higher management, to reduce the number of calls to your support staff, and to develop a common understanding of the reality of how the website is performing, consider User Journey monitoring.

Ask the customer service team to define five or six main User Journeys that customers take through the online services offered, journeys like 'add to basket' or 'register online' or 'change my postal address' or whatever the functional features of your web portal are. And then have all these journeys monitored 24/7 - showing delivery times and error rates.

Have the real-time results available on the Intranet to the call centre and other customer service staff - so that they can check in real-time themselves when an end customer says the web site is broken. Most of the time the call centre will be able to say to the customer that the function they were using was in fact working fine all morning, so the problem is most likely to be on the customer's PC. The result will probably be greater understanding all round and far fewer end-user complaints getting through to your support desk.