Consumers give stark warning to online retailers if applications let them down
By Gregg Ostrowski
Picture the scene. You’ve spent the past half hour searching online for the best deal on a new smart TV. You’ve placed your chosen item in your basket ready to buy. And then something goes wrong. It might be that the screen freezes and the dreaded “never-ending spinning wheel” appears. Or maybe you get an error message when you’re trying to process your payment. Whatever the issue, how is it going to make you feel? All of that time you’ve wasted and you’ve probably missed out on the deal you wanted.
Unfortunately, these types of experiences are happening all the time. And the consequences for the retailers behind these applications are profound.
At Cisco Dynamics, we recently surveyed 12,000+ global consumers, exploring their intentions around holiday season shopping this year. And for retailers, the findings make for sober reading.
Online shoppers punish brands for poor digital experiences
As many as 65% of the consumers interviewed say they feel angry or anxious when the applications and digital services they are using for holiday shopping do not perform properly. When people are feeling so much pressure to find the best deals and make their budgets stretch further, consumers are totally unforgiving towards any brand who fails to deliver a seamless digital experience. Indeed, 66% state that there is simply no excuse for a poor digital experience – even if a retailer is offering the very best deals, it’s still not enough to make amends.
Brands have no room for error. The majority of consumer’s state that retailers have only one shot to impress them and if they come up short, they will vote with their feet. They’ll ditch the application in question and find an alternative option with a competitor brand. Other people might even give up online shopping altogether and opt to go back to the stores.
Delivering on the digital experience is more important than ever
While digital experience is always critical within the retail sector, the stakes will be raised even higher over the coming weeks because we’re likely to see record levels of traffic swarming to applications and digital services. 43% of consumers plan to do more of their shopping online, compared to last year, versus only 13% who plan to do more in-store shopping.
In line with this, the volume and value of online sales are set to explode. Consumers plan to spend 59% of their holiday shopping budgets online rather than in stores. This is a big jump from 53% last year, and more evidence of the increasing dominance of online sales in key retail dates.
With many consumers feeling the pinch of a tough economic climate, they see online shopping as the best way to find the best deals and save money. They’re also opting for online over in-store to access a greater choice of products and avoid the time and stress of big shopping expeditions.
Ensuring digital services and application perform as required
When it comes to ensuring that applications and digital services deliver the experiences consumers demand, retail IT teams have their work cut out.
Over recent years, retailers have ramped up their use of cloud native technologies to accelerate their innovation programs, but technologists now find themselves trying to manage an ever more complex and dispersed application environment.
For example, many IT teams have limited visibility into their Kubernetes environment, and this makes it incredibly difficult for them to identify issues and fix issues before they impact end user experience. They have no clear line of sight for applications where components run across cloud-native and on-premises technologists so they can’t easily understand the root cause of issues. They’re being bombarded with data and alerts from across their application landscape, but they have no way to cut through the noise and make insight-driven decisions.
To overcome these challenges, IT teams need application observability to generate full and unified visibility across their hybrid environments and to easily and quickly detect and resolve issues. Crucially, application observability correlates application availability and performance data with real-time business metrics so technologists can immediately assess the potential risk that an issue poses to digital experience. Rather than scrambling to address issues, unsure of where to focus their efforts, IT teams can prioritize the most important issues and deliver seamless digital experiences to customers.
Retailers will have an unprecedented opportunity to attract huge numbers of new customers and drive sales. But they need to remember that the digital experiences they provide are now just as important to shoppers as the deals they’re offering. Retail leaders have been warned. Now it’s down to them to ensure their IT teams are equipped to keep applications operating at peak performance over the coming weeks.
(The author is Gregg Ostrowski, CTO Advisor, Cisco Observability, and the views expressed in this article are his own)
