posted on Thursday, November 13, 2008 3:36 AM

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As a general rule, we spend far more time worrying about external appearances than we do internal. We are more concerned with our external web applications and how they look - and perform - than we are likely to regarding our intranet or internal only applications.

This blog post was interesting in that rather than encouraging folks to optimize web sites and improve end-user response time for web applications for the sake of the user experience, it focused on the relationship between page load time and impact on Google AdWords quality scores. Which is a bit different than the typical "you'll lose customers if you don't have a fast site" lecture.

By incorporating landing page load time into Quality Score Index calculation, Google is trying to improve user experience and as a by product increase the ppc advertisers conversion rate. They are hopping that because visitors do not abandon the pages because of poor web page load speed advertisers will get a higher return on their investments.

But what about internal web applications? You know, the ones customer service and call center representatives access when some poor hapless customers actually picks up the

phone and calls them? Yeah, those web applications; the ones that invariably seem to be cause of "my computer is slow today" apologies from the other end of the line, leaving the customer to wait ... and wait... and wait.

While it's easy enough to justify improving internal web applications which are indirectly customer facing based on customer satisfaction, it's just as easy to justify improving the performance of those same applications based on more quantifiable metrics: employee productivity.

The performance of employees within a wide variety of organizations who are tasked with customer service roles is almost always based on number of customers served in any given time interval. X per hour, Y per day, Z per week, etc... The efficiency of your call center or customer service departments is directly impacted by the ability of the employees to access customer information via applications, and increasingly that application is web-based. And slow.

If the average page load time of a customer service application is 10 seconds, then you necessarily need to add 10*(number of pages required on a call) to the total call time per customer. If the employee needs to access 5 pages, then you've just added nearly a minute of "wait" time to the time it takes to serve one customer. Given that most call centers like to keep their calls to a few minutes each, there's barely enough time for the customer service representative to greet the customer and ask for their identification before they've already gone over their allotted time.

Employing asymmetric application acceleration technology to improve application response time is a common prescription for performance impaired web sites. That same technology can easily be applied to internal applications, web or otherwise, as well to improve their performance and thus, load time. By leveraging technologies such as intelligent caching and compression, and optimization of the protocols (TCP, HTTP) used to deliver those applications you can simultaneously improve performance of the application, efficiency of the servers serving the application, and the productivity of your employees. Now that's multitasking!

If you can decrease the time it takes to interact with an internal web application you can decrease the amount of time spent with each customer, which leaves more time for employees to interact with more customers, improving their performance on a "customers served per hour/day/week" basis. That's an improvement in productivity as well as your bottom line as it decreases the costs associated with maintaining a customer over time, which is a key performance indicator for most organizations in which customer interaction is required.

So when you're considering improving the performance of your external web site and applications, think twice about how that same application acceleration technology just might benefit your internal web applications as well.

Posted In: Development and General, Performance,