According to a recent survey from Symantec Corp, business application slowdowns affect business productivity, customer loyalty, and employee morale. Common impacts of such slowdowns include sluggish response to user commands, long delays in business transactions or processes, and slow loading Web pages.
“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,” said Henri Isenberg, vice president, server foundation and APM product group. “Customers have high expectations for their business applications and expect them to perform quickly and consistently. These findings emphasize the need for proactive end-to-end performance management solutions… that pinpoint bottlenecks, improve application performance, and increase business efficiency.”
The survey revealed that 24 percent of IT staff time is devoted to addressing business application performance delays. In complex business application environments, delays can be caused by changes or updates required to keep pace with user demand.
Additionally, the IT professionals polled recognize that the performance and availability of these applications directly affect the customer experience. Of the IT managers polled, 76 percent acknowledged that persistent delays would affect customer loyalty to their organizations.
Among the 200 consumers polled, 93 percent stated that they engaged in online shopping. Of those engaged in online shopping, 86 percent stated that frequent delays in their transactions (such as shopping, travel, and banking) would affect their loyalty to the service provider. In addition, 18 percent stated that slow online performance would cause them to switch to a competitor or abandon the transaction altogether.
The findings also indicate that application performance slowdowns affect employee productivity and morale. Of the business users polled, 86 percent stated that persistent delays would lower their morale. In addition, 93 percent of business user respondents noted that performance issues would affect their productivity.