What Is a Holiday Readiness Assessment?
Conducting a holiday readiness assessment helps ensure that all your critical systems can handle peak traffic, both online and in store. It also helps retailers avoid security weak spots and potential outages. For Camacho, this strategic health check includes high-volume performance and failover tests to identify bottlenecks and improve the ease of transactions. Retailers can also seek the help of an expert partner to run the check and solidify end-to-end platform support.
How Should Retailers Plan for a Successful Shopping Season?
As IT leaders connect in-store tech and prepare their e-commerce channels, they should prioritize a few key criteria.
“Customers want a frictionless holiday season,” Camacho says. For brick-and-mortar stores, that means point of sale, security, inventory layout and customer service. For e-commerce, he says, it’s “things like inventory management, visual merchandising, commerce or site optimization. You’ve got order management, fulfillment and shipping — that’s a big linchpin in the e-commerce industry.”
EXPLORE: Get the tools to perform your holiday readiness assessment this season.
Operational efficiency for online purchasing platforms and customer service systems is also important. For example, how are your customer service representatives preparing for the increased volume? What’s being done to prevent website delays or chatbot glitches? “From a performance perspective, we measure it in time. We don’t want the end user getting the ‘circle of death’ or the spinning wheel,” Camacho says.
How Can IT Leaders Stress-Test Their Environments in Advance?
There are several tests retailers and e-commerce teams can perform. The first is high-volume performance and failover tests to identify bottlenecks and improvements. Retailers can also conduct stress testing to see how applications run without any adjustment under peak traffic.
The second core type is what Camacho describes as a “white-glove monitoring service,” which includes continual live monitoring of the commerce environment and periodic updates to the system.