Case Study

Enhancing Customer Experience at Scale: Building a Reliable Performance Testing Framework for a Global Retail Organisation

An ongoing transformation project delivering a next-generation performance testing framework, built on proven success with other leading organisations

Executive Summary

Enhancing Customer Experience at Scale: Building a Reliable Performance Testing Framework for a Global Retail Organisation

As a leading global retailer rapidly expanded its digital presence, limitations in its legacy performance testing framework became increasingly evident. The existing approach focused mainly on backend load and stress testing, overlooking issues related to UI responsiveness, network conditions, and environment-specific configurations. This left the customer experience vulnerable, with risks of undetected slowdowns, outages, and inconsistent performance during peak demand.

To address these challenges, the organisation partnered with our team to design and implement a robust, modular performance testing framework. Drawing on successful experiences delivered for other clients, the proposed solution introduces comprehensive UI performance assessments, network and infrastructure simulations, and integration into CI/CD pipelines. While the project is still in the implementation phase, early results highlight improved visibility into customer experience metrics and faster detection of performance bottlenecks—laying the foundation for a more resilient digital platform.

The client is a multinational retail organisation, operating across North America, Europe, and Asia. With millions of customers and a rapidly growing online presence, its commitment to quality and value has positioned it as a leader in digital retail innovation.

As the retailer’s e-commerce platform scaled to support more users and frequent feature releases, the limitations of its existing performance testing framework became increasingly apparent. The framework primarily focused on back-end load and stress testing, overlooking issues stemming from network latency, environment-specific configurations, and UI responsiveness. This led to undetected slowdowns, sporadic outages, and inconsistent customer experiences, especially during peak traffic or when new features launched. The absence of holistic performance monitoring threatened the organisation’s ability to deliver a fast, reliable online shopping experience, making it urgent to adopt a solution that could address infrastructure, network, and front-end challenges collectively.

We initiated a comprehensive enhancement of the performance testing strategy. The new solution expands the legacy framework to cover not just API and back-end load, but also network conditions, environment and configuration variables, and—crucially—UI performance. Leveraging industry-leading tools and custom scripts, we designed tests to simulate real-world user navigation, measuring page load times, responsiveness, and visual stability across different devices.

Our proposed approach—grounded in proven successes with other customers—includes close collaboration with the client’s IT and development teams throughout the implementation phase, ensuring buy-in and alignment with business priorities. Training and documentation are being provided to empower teams to maintain and expand the new framework, with ongoing monitoring and optimisation planned as the solution matures.The Results

Early runs of the new UI performance tests have already surfaced issues that were previously undetected by the legacy framework, especially those related to front-end responsiveness and environment-specific bottlenecks. Stakeholders have noted increased visibility into customer experience metrics, and the testing team is now equipped to simulate real-world scenarios more accurately.

Although implementation is still ongoing, early runs of the new UI performance tests have already surfaced issues that were previously undetected by the legacy framework, especially those related to front-end responsiveness and environment-specific bottlenecks. Stakeholders have noted increased visibility into customer experience metrics, and the testing team is now equipped to simulate real-world scenarios more accurately.

Key Takeaways And Why It Matters

  • Early UI performance testing has already identified issues missed by legacy backend-focused frameworks.

  • Realistic user simulations are providing valuable insights into actual customer experience.

  • Cross-team collaboration has improved, with development and QA working together to address performance bottlenecks sooner.

  • The new approach—based on proven success with other clients—lays the groundwork for ongoing optimisation and a more resilient e-commerce platform.

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