By
Joe Byrne, Vice President of Technology Strategy and Executive CTO at
AppDynamics, part of Cisco
The holiday season
has arrived which comes with a surge in holiday shopping, both online or in
stores to catch the seasonal sales and get ahead on gift buying. Most companies
expect to see increased digital traffic and aim to prepare accordingly.
The past two years
have reiterated the importance of this preparation as the reliance on digital
services and applications in almost every area of our lives has led to higher expectations
from consumers for performance of services. As we suddenly depended on
applications for activities like going to school, working or getting a checkup
with our doctor, companies had to speed up their digital transformation and
compete for consumer attention. While the competition and change in consumer
demands led to the development of new, innovative applications that continue to
make tasks easier or more enjoyable, it ultimately caused a shift in end users'
attitudes and online shopping behaviors.
Decreased Tolerance for Poor
Performance This Holiday Season
Today,
consumers are moving into the holiday shopping season having more experience
with applications and expecting them to perform. In a consumer study titled, "The App Attention Index 2021: Who takes the rap for the
app?," Cisco AppDynamics found that 61%
of consumers will no longer tolerate poor performance and are more likely to
immediately delete an application and switch to an alternative provider the
moment they encounter a problem.
Similarly,
if applications don't perform properly, then consumers blame the retailer
behind it. In fact, 72% of surveyed consumers believe that it's always the
responsibility of the brand to ensure that the digital service or application
works perfectly -- they aren't interested in the cause of the issue. In cases
where a consumer's digital experience is being impacted by external factors
such as bad internet connectivity, 4G/5G mobile network issues or slow payment
gateways, they may still blame the application and company for slow page
loading, poor response times, downtime, or security failures.
More Holiday Shoppers Can Bring
Additional Pressure to IT Teams
Recent
outages from larger companies in the social media space
or cloud provider
realm have served as a timely reminder for retail leaders that IT performance
issues can escalate quickly. A survey that AppDynamics conducted in the wake of
those events found that IT decision-makers worldwide were experiencing
increased pressure
from their organization's leadership to prevent a major performance issue or
outage of their applications and digital services. Application downtime from
even the most targeted companies can have a negative impact on the end user,
putting IT teams in the hot seat.
To ensure their
applications perform at an optimal level throughout the holiday season,
retailers need to be certain
their technologists have the tools and insight required to identify and
fix performance issues before customer experience is impacted. With full-stack observability, IT
departments have full visibility into performance up and down the IT stack,
from customer-facing applications right through to core infrastructure.
Full-stack observability is vital to identify and fix issues before they impact
users.
Additionally,
by connecting full-stack observability with real-time business metrics,
technologists can cut through the heightened data noise around the holidays and
spot the issues that will have the biggest impact on customers. A business lens
on IT performance allows them to prioritize their actions in the right places,
based on the most critical KPIs such as customer experience, sales transactions
and revenue.
Maintaining
consumer satisfaction this holiday shopping season is more important and more
difficult than ever. Retailers need to work with their IT teams to react
quickly and decisively to keep up with consumer expectations and continue to
drive business success. Don't wait until it's too late -- is full-stack
observability with business context on your "shopping list" yet?
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ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
Joe Byrne is Vice President of Technology Strategy and Executive CTO at
AppDynamics, a part of Cisco. His primary focus is on working with customers and
prospects on APM strategy and helping with digital transformations. He also
works closely with Sales, Marketing, Product and Engineering on product
strategy. Prior to AppDynamics, Joe held technology leadership roles at
Albertsons, EllieMae and Johnson and Johnson.