In the ever-evolving landscape of Malaysia’s tech scene, the latest data from the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) paints a dynamic picture of the nation’s ecommerce sector. With a noteworthy year-on-year growth of 10.4% in the first quarter of 2023, the country’s digital marketplace is riding high on the shoulders of a robust community of 33.3 million internet users and a staggering 44.05 million active cellular mobile connections.
As Malaysia’s ecommerce ecosystem continues to expand, the stakes for applications and brands in this arena have never been higher. According to a recent survey conducted by AppDynamics, a significant 60% of customers attribute performance issues to the application or brand itself. This underscores the critical importance of ensuring optimal performance, especially for public-facing applications like those in the ecommerce realm.
We look at why Malaysia’s infrastructure cannot handle ecommerce growth
Tech teams now find themselves at the forefront of this digital battleground, tasked with ensuring that their applications not only meet but exceed user expectations. The ability to discern between network and application delays becomes paramount to sidestep potential pitfalls and preempt any blame game scenarios. As we delve into the intricacies of Malaysia’s flourishing ecommerce domain, the imperative for tech teams to measure and optimize their applications’ speed becomes all the more evident.
To find out more about ecommerce performance in Malaysia, we speak to seasoned digital strategist Jay Sanderson, who is the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Progress. He is responsible for product marketing for the leading digital experience platform, Progress Sitefinity DX.
How big of a problem is poor app performance in Southeast Asia?
The continued flourishing of super apps in Southeast Asia shows that communities across the region value usability, easy access to the services and products that they need and won’t stand for poor performance. A 1-second delay in load time can slash conversion rates by 20%. In Southeast Asia, where mobile is king, this is not just poor performance, it’s a death knell for customer retention.
Businesses are increasingly aware of this demand-side push – which is consistent across generations – and are wary of losing customers due to poor app performance. In fact, a joint report by Meta, Bain & Company, and DSG Consumer Partners finds that Gen Zs are, unsurprisingly, at the head of this; with 54% using apps for the discovery phase, 58% for evaluation, and three quarters for purchases.
The same report also found that other generations were not far behind – with the split being 53%, 57%, and 79% for the respective phases. This is also borne out by a report from Meltwater and We Are Social, which states that Southeast Asia can boast some of the most digitally engaged consumers anywhere.
However, there remains significant issues, such as tedious login and sign-up processes that pushed 84% of consumers from across Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Oceania to abandon carts, according to Auth0.
Could you elaborate on the main issues that are impacting user experience on apps right now?
High satisfaction app experiences typically have responsive design, quick filtering and search, a simple checkout process, and optimised app architecture. However, standing in the way of these are disparate development environments – which adds friction to the delivery of any given app. Disparate development environments don’t just add friction—they create an insurmountable wall that stifles innovation and user satisfaction
Furthermore, many organisations lack the smart tools that enable total control over infrastructure management, network observability, as well as issue detection and resolution. This, in turn, hampers their ability to respond to app experience changes from within, as well as those from without – such as technological advancements and marketplace shifts.
Then there is also the issue of organisations being ill equipped to ensure that networks and applications are stable, compliant, highly available, optimised and high performing. Which is why application performance monitoring (APM) tools come in handy, as they are able to slash bottleneck identification times substantially – which significantly improves cost savings when IT has to remediate issues with apps in case they do occur.
Besides ecommerce, where do you see the main industries facing similar issues in Southeast Asia?
Financial services, alongside e-commerce, are hemorrhaging customer goodwill due to app inefficiencies. The cost? Customer trust and ultimately, their business. However, all consumer facing apps should perform at a high level, these problems aren’t limited to specific industries per se. That being said, financial services are a prime example of some of the issues we’ve touched on previously. For instance, PwC finds that 68% of Southeast Asian banks see improving customer experience as the primary driver for digitalisation.
However, more than 80% of respondents reported that they have not yet successfully achieved their digitalisation goals, despite over 70% indicating that they have a clear digital strategy. This would indicate that where banks in the region are falling short is in their ability to deliver fast, highly available and secure information to their apps. This also appears to point to operations teams being challenged more than ever – grappling with managing and scaling operations while coping with tool sprawl, network complexity, data silos, and potential cyber threats.
Overcoming these issues rests on having the insights that shed light on how fast apps run, which ones are substandard and how to get those up to scratch. This is crucial to knowing if customers and prospects are happy – and if they aren’t, it allows fixes to be made before they turn their backs on the app. Ultimately, if IT does not know the root cause of a performance-related issue, they can’t solve it.
Who should be managing this issue; the CIO or the CMO?
Both. CIOs are custodians of the app’s efficiency and effectiveness throughout its lifecycle – from meeting performance goals in development and testing, to monitoring performance in production, and making the necessary changes to ensure continued high performance.
Meanwhile, CMOs shape user experiences and expectations in a more fundamental way than may seem obvious initially. Their domain responsibility of creating and executing engaging campaigns requires them to understand how apps work on a technical level. They, therefore, need to work with IT teams to ensure their content is relevant to users, while being aligned with expectations around app performance. Only a unified command can swiftly navigate the choppy waters of digital user experience.
While the CIO and CMO may, on the surface, have different priorities, both can collaborate through APMs to leverage data to meet their goals. They can also utilise APMs to integrate their respective critical processes and enable smooth, frictionless services that delight end users.
What’s next for Progress in Southeast Asia?
The region continues to be key for us and we look forward to exploring more opportunities with our customers and partners. Using our products, they can accelerate their path to success with the faster cycles of innovation that we deliver and achieve a greater competitive advantage to ensure their growth in the future. We remain committed to them and their success and can’t wait to see what the new year holds for us.