It doesn’t matter how incredible your product is or how your services might bring amazing value; if the customer experience is lacking, you run the risk of your customers going elsewhere. In fact, recent data reveals that 80% of customers value customer experience as much as the products and services. Enhancing your customer experience is a fundamental way of getting a step ahead of your rivals. And, in competitive markets, you cannot afford to overlook it.
Delivering a great customer experience used to be pretty straightforward; many interactions were face-to-face, and it was your team's helpfulness and personability that created those positive experiences. Fast forward to today, and enhancing the customer experience is heavily reliant on digital interactions; websites, mobile apps, customer live chats, and digital payment systems are just a few of the tools that we're all very used to when interacting as a customer online. And this is where the importance of network optimisation comes in.
In this blog, we're exploring the role of network optimisation in enhancing the customer experience. We'll look at why it's needed, what network issues can occur if it is neglected and what strategies can be implemented to ensure your network delivers top-quality customer experiences that support your business's success.
What is Network Optimisation?
Network optimisation describes processes that are geared towards improving network performance, reliability and efficiency, with the goal of ensuring that your team and your customers can access what they need online with ease. Think of your network as a digital version of a road system. Network optimisation ensures that all the traffic flows smoothly, so that all your data gets where it needs to be quickly, safely and without hassle.
Key techniques in network optimisation include bandwidth management, traffic prioritisation, and reducing latency, which we cover in more detail below.
Why is Network Optimisation Vital for Enhancing the Customer Experience?
Enhancing customer experience (in the digital world) centres around fast, reliable and consistent digital interactions. However, without network optimisation, your business can experience online challenges that frustrate customers and erode trust.
As a customer, there’s nothing more off-putting when trying to access information than the page not loading properly, being slow or, worse, being down completely. If your customers’ frustration gets too much, you risk them going elsewhere to get what they need.
Network optimisation reduces the chances of these disruptions. Instead, it enables your customers to enjoy seamless, high-quality digital encounters with your brand that enhance satisfaction and loyalty and encourage return visits.
What Network Issues Impact Customer Experience?
Without optimisation, your network can face several issues that can result in a less-than-ideal user experience. These include:
Bandwidth limitations: Like a single-lane road at rush hour, insufficient bandwidth means there’s not enough capacity for all your traffic trying to get through, creating frustrating slowdowns.
High latency: Lags or delays in data travelling from A to B make apps and online platforms unresponsive and sluggish.
Packet loss: When data is lost, it results in glitchy video or audio streams, incomplete downloads, and apps not working properly.
Network congestion: Like a traffic jam, peak times with too many users or devices leads to delays, interruptions and sometimes things grinding to a halt.
Outdated or faulty hardware: Old or malfunctioning tech struggles to keep up, leading to slow speeds, frequent drops, or even complete system crashes
As your business grows, more devices, applications and users increase network traffic, only worsening these issues. Implementing network optimisation is critical, without it you risk harming your customer relationships, damaging brand reputation and hindering business success.
Strategies to Optimise Your Network and Improve Customer Experience
All is not lost; network issues don’t have to be permanent roadblocks. By deploying the right network optimisation strategies, you can tackle these challenges head-on and ensure your customer interactions are frustration-free. Here’s how:
Traffic prioritisation
When your network is overloaded with high levels of traffic, we need to prioritise the most critical activity. This process can be achieved using network management tools like SD-WAN. These act as digital traffic wardens, preventing background processes from slowing down what really matters and ensuring interactions such as customer-facing services run smoothly.
Reducing latency
The responsiveness of your apps and websites can be improved by using intelligent routing. This network optimisation strategy reduces latency by finding the fastest path for data to travel. With delays reduced, your real-time services, such as video calls and live demos, run without interruption, making them much more engaging.
Bandwidth management
There are a variety of smart tools that proactively monitor and manage network bandwidth. With these, you can allocate the appropriate amount of bandwidth to each task to keep everything running without a hitch, even during peak times.
Network resilience
Downtime is the ultimate customer frustration. Adopting a cloud-managed network allows you to monitor and manage everything in real time from a single platform. It ensures issues are spotted early and fixed before they impact customer experience. Cloud-managed networks also support scalability, meaning that as your business grows, your network performance doesn't suffer.
Hardware upgrades
The best strategies in the world cannot overcome old, struggling equipment. Therefore, by evaluating your hardware, such as your routers, switches and servers, and making the necessary upgrades to modern, high-performance options, your network will be able to keep up with today’s digital demands
Simplify Network Optimisation with a Managed Network Services Provider
Implementing these network optimisation strategies may seem daunting, especially if your network is complex and stretches over multiple sites. That's where a Managed Network Service Provider like Hughes comes to the rescue!
Hughes specialises in designing, deploying and managing tailored network management solutions that align with your business objectives. We're experts in network optimisation strategies, such as SD-WAN implementation and bandwidth management, and we also provide 24/7 proactive network monitoring. As your network management partner, we’ll ensure all your digital interactions lead to efficient, secure operations and happy, satisfied customers.
To explore how we can support your network management, please get in touch with our team.