Improvements to our gift voucher feature on all websites

A negative customer experience is never good. For those purchasing gift vouchers for a loved one, this is doubly so. To help improve the experience that your end customers have in edge-case situations we’ve made the following changes:

1. Continuous enterprise-grade synthetic user testing of gift voucher setups to detect issues before users encounter them.
2. Real-time enterprise error detection and reporting.
3. Dedicated enterprise email delivery system, improving email deliverability and the reporting of failed deliveries.
4. On page/voucher checkout feedback and error collection form for end customers.
5. Changing the standard payment method to PayPal to credit/debit card via Stripe.
6. An automatic follow-up email to customers on checkout completion, allowing for them to raise any issues they encounter.

FAQ

What is synthetic user testing?

Synthetic user testing is the use of scripting to replicate a customer interacting with a website in an organic manner. This is done automatically and at set intervals, typically once every day. In essence, the scripting creates a fake customer who completes the purchase of a voucher from start to finish. This is done in the exact same manner as a real person would. This means when the system fails for any reason, the error will be detected and reported to us.

How is real-time error detection and reporting different from the above synthetic user testing?

The biggest benefit to synthetic user testing is that it replicates a real person’s experience interacting with the website. But this is also its biggest weakness. As it is only concerned with the task that the ‘robot’ is scripted (trained) to complete, if it is able to complete the task, then no error is recorded. This means that it does not make any allowances for visual issues such as a broken layout or an image not displaying.

Real-time error detection supplements the synthetic user testing by monitoring for these other issues that might affect the wider site, the gift voucher functionality specifically or errors that are caused by edge case user behaviour.