During the Glazer-Kennedy Info-Summit a few weeks ago in Atlanta (see my earlier post here), one of our talented sales representatives, Jordan Hatch, made me aware of something from one of our customers was experiencing: slow Web forms. Web forms are used to capture leads from your website and put them into your customer database … a primary feature of Infusionsoft.
The customer commented that once a site visitor submitted the form in some cases it was taking too long to process, resulting in visitors to abandon (and never make it into the customer database). Not good.
Instead of packing away the issue at the bottom of the suit case along with his dirty socks, Jordan returned home and in true Infusionsoft style, immediately started to dig in and troubleshoot (did I mention that Jordan is a sales rep?). He rigged up an automated test to see how long, on average, it took for an Infusionsoft Web form to be processed.
Our Web forms are unique because not only do they add the visitor’s data to the customer database, they also perform a series of automated commands that can effortlessly segment and group the new contacts, initiate or stop an auto-responder sequence or follow-up campaign, notify the site owner of the new opt-in, and dozens of other actions. Through Jordan’s grassroots testing, he discovered that forms were taking an average 3-4 seconds to process… not bad, but could be improved, especially if it meant increasing response rates for thousands of our customers and their prospects.
Jordan’s advocacy for customers and his initiative are characteristics that we strive for everyday and I wanted to publicly share my gratitude for it.
Next, Jordan brought the issue to Marc Chesley, our VP of Development & Technology, who pulled out the big guns. Marc felt it was important to investigate and improve, even if we could only shave off a handful of milliseconds from the processing time. After a “Special Forces” team of developers invested a week of testing, tweaking code, and playing with ‘threads’ (did I mention that I’m a marketing and sales guy?), they nailed it!
The special forces team who went in, found the issue and fixed it for a customer: Ross Beamish, Ryan Peterson, Marc Chesley, James Thompson, Joseph Mask, Jordan Hatch and Mike Daniels. Thank you!
The result was that our Web form processing time was cut from four seconds down to a paltry 70 milliseconds … or 7/100ths of a second. Now that’s fast! Mind you, this was done in a scientifically-sound proven development environment so we could correctly measure the impact. Here is a chart that demonstrates the impact of their work:
The best part of this is not only the initiative, the compassion for our customers and a solid example of how we set out to make the best darn marketing software for small business … the enhancement is planned to roll out tonight! Everyone should feel this benefit and have even more confidence in our software and service!
–Dave
UPDATE 12/18: Our developer, Mike, has increased Web Form Performance even more. In an internal email, he states, “You may be interested to hear that I made it even faster. 
It is down to 37 milliseconds now. (Down from 70). I was able to squeeze a little extra speed out by pushing the [double] opt-in email and notification to the app owner that their form was filled out into their own thread.” Nice work again, Mike!
