Struggling Applications Cost More Than Lost Productivity

September 12th, 2006: Symantec has published the results of a new survey showing how poor application performance can directly translate to lost business.

Conducted in July this year, Symantec commissioned Applied Research to survey 200 IT managers, 200 end users in Global 1,000 organisations, and 200 consumers in the US. It’s results show that business application slowdowns are contributing to lost productivity, lower customer loyalty, and decreased employee morale.

Symantec says that eighteen percent of the customers polled would switch to a competitor or forgo a transaction due to persistent application delays. These include sluggish response to user commands, long delays in business transactions or processes and slow loading web pages.

It says web-based business applications have become essential to daily operations with employees, customers, and business partners, and must be in top shape to keep customers coming back and employees happy.

“Application performance delays are not only costly to the top line but they also erode invaluable business assets such as customer satisfaction and brand loyalty," says Henri Isenberg, vice president, server foundation and APM product group for Symantec. “Customers have high expectations for their business applications and expect them to perform quickly and consistently.”

Overall the survey found:

• IT Staff Spend 24 percent of Their Time Resolving Application Slowdowns caused by changes or updates required to keep pace with end user demand.
• 76 percent of IT professionals acknowledged that persistent delays would affect customer loyalty to their organisations.
• 86 percent of business users stated that persistent delays would lower their morale. In addition, 93 percent of business user respondents noted that performance issues would affect their productivity.
• 93 percent of consumers stated that they engaged in online shopping, 86 percent of which stated that frequent delays in their transactions such as shopping, travel, and banking would affect their loyalty to the service provider.

Comment on this story