KLM and the Internet
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM) launched its first website in 1996 with an online brochure that had limited booking possibilities. At the end of 2001, the course was changed and an aggressive e-business strategy was put into place. The goal: To increase customer satisfaction, increase the website return and decrease the costs.
With www.klm.nl and www.klm.com , KLM has developed a full interactive selling and service channel. In the fiscal year 2004/2005, 12% of the total return was realised through the Internet. Goal for 2007/2008 is for the share of online sales to expand to 40%. Furthermore, in the Netherlands, 50% of all bookings are already completely electronically.
Need for insight into web performance in relation to website use
The Internet allows KLM to collect rich data of their customers that they can analyse to learn about customer preferences, etc. They use this knowledge to better service their customers (because KLM now knows what they like and do not like). Right from the beginning, KLM continually collected data from visitors and customers through the Internet and with help from software. At the end of 2003, the need arose to monitor the influence website performance has on how visitors actually experience and use the site. In the past, website performance was charted within KLM from synthetic transactions (which comes down to simulating website visitors). Although this offered some points of departure, it did not provide insight into the actual performance experienced by KLM site visitors. For example, it could not be deduced which response times were or weren’t acceptable to site visitors. And whether people found the site ‘fast enough’. That is why KLM began a search to discover a solution that would provide these answers.
The selection course: webProbe
After the selection course and a trial period of five months, KLM chose webProbe by Moniforce. The deciding factors were as follows. First, the non-intrusive measuring method. Second, the insight provided in the so-called ‘last mile’. (This means that KLM now has complete insight into the end-to-end response times of all visitors world-wide.) Third, there is insight into the part KLM systems play on the total response time, as well as the time factor from the Internet itself. In the end, Moniforce was selected because it is the only party in the market that uses the same architecture for measuring web performance and mapping data on online visitor behaviour (web analytics). This means that in the future KLM can fully integrate both types of data—web performance and web analytics.
The results
With help from webProbe, KLM now sees, for example, how visitors react to page loading times. Do people wait for the requested pages or do they click further before a page has fully loaded? In addition, it can now be seen that when performance slows (because the website is busy), visitors click more frequently on ‘Stop’ or ‘Refresh’. Even the consequences of slow performance on the final conversion to sold tickets are now known. By implementing the right adjustments and improvements in content, navigation and the web infrastructure, customer satisfaction has been increased and KLM generates greater online returns.