New “Virtual Customer” Helps E-tailers Provide Optimum Online Experience

[February 26th 2001]

As more and more e-commerce Websites come online and Internet transactions increase, Websites that provide the best online sales experience to customers stand to retain the biggest market share.

To meet those Website transaction challenges, a growing application service provider (ASP) called Vericity has recently launched the first "virtual customer" for Website quality assurance (QA) testing. Vericity provides an outsourced method of intensive, around-the-clock site performance monitoring to companies with mission-critical sites. Vericity's proprietary "virtual customer" technology called MoniQA ("Monica" for Monitoring Quality Assurance) interacts with e-commerce sites from a customer's perspective to ensure a high-quality online sales experience.

MoniQA is targeted at companies who are trying to keep overall Website functionality near peak performance to prevent losing important customers or revenue. Vericity provides this service to companies from start-up to Fortune 250 -- one such company is JC Penney, who maintains one of the largest e-commerce sites on the Internet. MoniQA virtually visits Websites and interacts just as a real customer would do. She can perform buying functions for every product on the site, click every link, read all the content and complete every transaction. MoniQA then notifies the company of any site errors so they can be repaired before a real customer experiences them. MoniQA is designed to eliminate poor site experiences that can result in lost sales. But perhaps more importantly, she amasses large amounts of data on each visit and provides e-commerce executives with the quantified data, graphs and charts they need to make informed business decisions. She also provides companies with an independent method of verifying that their third-party service contracts are being met.

What sets MoniQA apart from competitors is that she provides a much more in-depth service than her technically limited, script-based competitors. Script-based tools simply record and replay transactions over and over, which requires time-intensive setup and extensive maintenance. MoniQA is built with object-oriented programming, making her the only service that can shop through a Web site the way a real person would. She can change her buying patterns with each visit and adapt intuitively to Web site changes. This allows MoniQA to gather much more sophisticated user experience data during each visit and is the reason that Vericity calls MoniQA "The World's First True Virtual Customer."

"MoniQA was developed through a partnership with a successful online business and then was honed for six months through our close relationship with JC Penney, so we were able to tailor both her monitoring capabilities and her internal reports and graphs to exactly meet the needs of successful e-tailers," says Jen Silver, Vericity's Vice-President of Marketing. "She is the first service to effectively quantify the customer's experience." Putting Webmasters and other IT professionals in charge of monitoring draws their talents and resources away from the job of building and improving the site. Many in-house IT staffs don't have the time to buy, install, configure and manage error-monitoring software. MoniQA allows IT departments to leave the monitoring to the virtual customer. "We think companies will find that they can't do without a quality site-testing application like MoniQA," says Silver.

Links
Vericity		http://www.vericity.com