San Mateo, Calif., — August 16, 2005 — If you want to understand how to do business on the Web, look to learn from online brokerage sites, according to new competitive intelligence from Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority®. The Keynote Service Level Rankings for Brokerage Web Sites (customers) reveals that brokerage Web sites generally maintain the Internet's highest service levels, fine tuning their Web sites to within fractions of percentage points of each other for responsiveness and reliability. The study examined in depth the online service levels at the same leading brokerage Web sites which are measured all year for speed and reliability on the Keynote Broker Trading Index (KBTI) and offers new insights into the intensely competitive nature of this market.
For the study, Keynote evaluated the Web sites of the following brokerage companies for a one month period: Ameritrade (Nasdaq: AMTD), Brown & Co (NYSE: JPM), E*TRADE (NYSE: ET), Fidelity, First Trade, HARRIS Direct, Merrill Lynch Direct (NYSE: MER), Charles Schwab (NYSE: SCH), TRowe Price (Nasdaq: TROW) and TD Waterhouse (NYSE: TD). Keynote compared a Web transaction, which is core to the trading business— placing a trade—beginning at the home page, logging in, obtaining a quote, placing a market order, previewing the order and logging out. The Keynote study compared seven key performance factors: high-speed response, dial-up response time, response time consistency, geographic uniformity, load handling, availability and outages.
"The Keynote study found that Web site service levels in the brokerage industry continue to far exceed other verticals, indicating to us that others in highly competitive industries such as travel and retail should look to brokerage for best practices. While we repeatedly measured only a single transaction, it touches important portions of a Web site," said Ben Rushlo, manager of professional services for Keynote. "The amount of data collected— 26,000 samples per site, 260,000 in all, over the month long study—reveals an intense competition between these sites to perform to sub-second speeds and provide excellent service levels to customers."
Although the top six sites were very close to each other in both responsiveness and reliability indicating a holistic focus on service levels, E*TRADE was not only the speed demon of the industry at times executing an entire transaction (consisting of five pages) in four seconds, but also the most reliable Web site.
| Keynote Service Level Rankings Site Responsiveness | |
|---|---|
| 1 | E*TRADE |
| 2 | Fidelity |
| 3 | Harris Direct |
| Keynote Service Level Rankings Site Reliability | |
|---|---|
| 1 | E*TRADE |
| 2 | TRowe Price |
| 3 | Harris Direct |
As a whole the industry provides excellent service levels with only two sites reporting any outages at all and only four hours among all 10 sites for the entire month of the study. However in this industry, even being best among one's peers, still leaves room for improvement. While the sites were tightly packed for reliability, when it came to response time the top six were separated by small margins and there was a significant drop-off for the bottom four companies.
Another interesting finding is that while brokerage sites set the gold standard for high-speed response, they are only average or just above average over dial-up connections. Pages averaged about 25 seconds to download and it was not uncommon to see 60+ second pages.
The Keynote Service Level Rankings for Brokerage Web Sites (customers), provides in-depth competitive analysis of the online brokerage industry and contain hundreds of additional data points and a detailed analysis of study findings. For an abstract of the study go to http://www.keynote.com/solutions/ci_brokers.html
About Keynote Service Level Studies
Keynote's competitive intelligence studies into Service Levels analyze and compare the responsiveness and reliability of leading Web sites in a particular industry. Compared to the company's simpler Web transaction performance indices that run year-round, service level studies deliver a deeper analysis of additional performance factors, evaluated over a shorter time period. The studies measure a common Web-based transaction performed against a set of Web sites in an industry.
Keynote typically collects over 5,000 separate measurements of each site in the study over a three-week period. From this data, more than 30 service level metrics are computed, then summarized into the following ten performance factors: response times (over high speed, DSL and dial up connections), response consistency, geographic uniformity, load handling, page design, network connectivity, site reliability and outage hours. Keynote's service level management (SLM) solutions provide enterprises with the tools to align IT and e-business goals. To learn more about Keynote?s SLM solutions, visit: http://www.keynote.com/solutions/service_level_management.html
About Keynote Customer Experience Studies
Keynote's competitive intelligence studies into Customer Experience rely on actual user behavior and feedback to benchmark the customer experience of the leading Web sites in an industry. Unlike traditional customer research methods, the Keynote studies uncover customer motivations and behaviors as the studied group pursues real-life tasks on the Web. Study results are based on the evaluation of more than 250 metrics from thousands of participants as they interact with the sites comprised in a particular study. Keynote's customer experience management (CEM) solutions offer both competitive intelligence studies and custom engagement services examining consumer attitudes and behavior on the Web. To learn more about Keynote's CEM solutions, visit: http://www.keynote.com/solutions/customer_experience_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 and marketing departments and 14,000 individual subscribers rely on Keynote’s portfolio 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:
Della Lowe, Keynote, (650) 403-3233, dlowe@keynote.com
Dan Berkowitz, Keynote, (650) 403-3305, dberkowitz@keynote.com