SAN MATEO, Calif., — May 17, 2005 — The results of Keynote’s comprehensive and in-depth study on the performance of nine leading U.S. credit card services Web sites were released today by Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority® and the findings offer up some surprising results for an industry dealing with mission-critical financial transactions.
On the whole, the group of Web sites studied for the Keynote Service Level Rankings for Credit Card Web Sites showed poorer than expected reliability. Performance was exceptionally poor for most of the sites over dial up connections indicating that these companies may have designed their Web site with only high-speed users in mind. Considering the fact that about 43% of U.S. households are still using dial up, the results could indicate a very frustrating experience for those customers who would have waited on average 35 seconds for each page of the transaction to download according to the Keynote study.
Keynote’s Service Level Rankings study assesses and compares site quality on technical performance as perceived by end users. To achieve service level excellence, a site must score well on a range of technical factors such as download speed, responsive time (over high speed, DSL and dial up connections), consistency, reliability, page design, Internet connectivity, and scalability. The Service Level Rankings examine and evaluate each of these and report on the strengths and weaknesses of each Web site.
The detailed analysis of the nine sites showed that Bank of America, Capital One and MBNA were the best overall performers garnering 77, 66 and 63 points out of 100 possible points respectively, although Bank of America dominated the overall rankings a full 11 points ahead of its nearest competitor, Capital One. The lowest ranking sites achieved only 38 and 34 points for overall ranking. However, no one site dominated all ten performance categories, which indicates a need for even the best sites to understand and improve in some areas.
The nine sites included in the study were American Express, Bank of America, BankOne, Capital One, Chase, Citibank, Discover, MBNA and Providian Financial.
Poor Service Levels Can Drive Customers to Expensive Call Centers
Only Bank of America and MBNA reported close to 99 percent average reliability during the peak periods of 8 AM to Midnight EST, Monday through Friday, while the index average was about 97.5%, which is much lower than Keynote would have expected for this industry. The least reliable site averaged less than 94%. The cost of site downtime can be very high when customers are driven to call centers to accomplish tasks.
The best credit card sites, Bank of America and MBNA, were down less than 3 hours during the entire month of the study, while the worst reported over 19 hours of downtime. When customer service costs are compared between expensive call centers and self-service Web sites, the amount of money spent to service a customer who is unable to get to a Web site is enormous.
On a more optimistic note, six of the nine sites studied showed a good ability to handle load indicating that the industry has paid attention to developing its infrastructure and adding capacity to handle peak loads.
“Convenient online services such as balance inquiries, viewing transactions and managing profiles, have helped credit card companies build customer loyalty and enhance brand affinity while improving their cost structure and capitalizing on their Internet presence,” said Dharmesh Thakker, senior product manager for service level management services at Keynote. “Although convenient online services may be competitive differentiators for credit card companies, prospects and customers will not appreciate them unless the site performs well every time.”
Background on the Keynote Study Performed on Credit Card Web Sites
For The Keynote Service Level Rankings for Credit Card Web Sites, Keynote compared the process of accessing the most recent charges on a credit card and changing the billing address through each of the nine credit card Web sites as any customer would.
The best performing sites topped the Keynote Service Level Rankings, based on a comparison of 10 key performance factors. The results were obtained using Keynote’s highly accurate and realistic Transaction Perspective® measurement service by taking 6000 measurements of each site over a four-week period from February 21 through March 20, 2005. From this data, 34 distinct service level metrics were computed for each Web site ranked, and the rankings summarized into the 10 key performance factors.
Keynote Service Level Rankings for Credit Card Web Sites provides in-depth competitive analysis of the Web credit card industry and contains hundreds of additional data points and a detailed analysis of study findings. For more information about this study, to download an abstract or to purchase the complete study, visit: http://www.keynote.com/solutions/slm_slr_credit_card.html.
Keynote Systems provides a full range of measurement and monitoring, service level and customer experience management services. Keynote’s research studies provide insights into industry trends and service level and customer experience competitive benchmarks of important vertical industries.
To learn more about Keynote’s competitive benchmarking studies of customer experience and for a list of the various vertical industry reports that are available, visit: http://www.keynote.com/solutions/cem_syndicated_research.html.
To learn more about Keynote’s SLM solutions visit: http://www.keynote.com/solutions/service_level_management.html.
About Keynote
Founded in 1995, Keynote Systems (Nasdaq “KEYN”), The Internet Performance Authority®, is the worldwide leader in e-business performance management services. Over 2,100 corporate IT departments and 16,000 individual subscribers rely on Keynote’s growing range of measurement and monitoring, service level and customer experience management services to improve e-business performance by reducing costs, improving customer satisfaction and increasing profitability.
Keynote is viewed as The Internet Performance Authority due to the company’s global infrastructure of over 1,600 measurement computers in more than 50 cities worldwide that capture and store on a daily basis over 60 million Internet performance measurements, frequent media citations quoting Keynote's Web performance data and analysis, the company’s market-leading Web performance indices for vertical markets and leading customer research that provides critical business insight into online customer experiences, industry trends and competitive Web strategies.
Keynote Systems, Inc. is headquartered in San Mateo, California and can be reached at www.keynote.com or by phone in the U.S. at (650) 403-2400.
Keynote, The Internet Performance Authority and Perspective are registered trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. © 2005 Keynote Systems, Inc.
Editorial Contacts:
Dan Berkowitz, Keynote Systems, (650) 403-3305, dberkowitz@keynote.com
Della Lowe, Keynote Systems, (650) 403-3233, dlowe@keynote.com
Dan Cahill, Roaring Communications, (415) 552-3999, dcahill@roaringcommunications.com