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Application Performance is Key to Retail Customer Satisfaction

John Rakowski

For today’s always-on consumers, the performance of retail websites and mobile applications is strongly linked to customer satisfaction, loyalty and spend, according to a new study by AppDynamics.

Mobile apps play an increasingly important role in consumers’ lives – 20 percent of respondents admit to making purchases on their phone while at work in front of their computer, and 70 percent said they make more than a quarter of their purchases online.

The AppDynamics report "An App Is Not Enough" indicates that consumer expectations of retail websites and mobile apps are evolving in response to the growth of mobile and emerging technologies, with 70 percent of consumers stating that the performance of a mobile app impacts their perception of the retailer.

According to the report, 67 percent of consumers would be put off shopping with a retailer if they had a negative experience with its app, putting the onus on brands to deliver flawless application performance.

“As the lines between work and personal, digital and physical, continue to blur, retailers must ensure their apps function at all times across multiple platforms in order to retain and nurture always-on consumers,” said Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics. “Technology has transformed the retail landscape significantly over the past decade, and now more than ever, software defines business success – with revenue and reputation often hinging on customer interactions with apps.”

While digital technologies have provided consumers with more choices in how and where they shop, they have never been so time-poor, which may be why 40 percent of those surveyed say they would trial a new app if it promised to deliver a more convenient shopping experience. Furthermore, a third of consumers are now using apps for convenience when they visit a store or to make a swift purchase on the go.

The study, which surveyed 4,000 UK, US, French and German smartphone and tablet owners, also found:

■ 43 percent of consumers want mobile apps that allow them to purchase products while in the store, instead of queuing for a sales assistant.

■ 57 percent would like retail apps to provide store assistants with details of past purchases for a tailored omni-channel experience.

■ 56 percent would be encouraged to visit brick-and-mortar stores if apps provided them with personalized offers when they were close by.

■ If unable to complete a purchase, three quarters of consumers stated that a prompt and personal apology would persuade them to revisit the retailer.

“Today’s consumers expect a seamless shopping experience across online and offline channels, with minimal friction points,” said Paul Hobbs, head of e-commerce at Shop Direct. “This puts increased pressure on retailers to innovate, using the latest technologies to improve and augment the online e-commerce journey so it delivers the thrill of visiting the high street in a more convenient way. As an example, Very.com has recently introduced image recognition technology that allows shoppers to take photos of clothes they like and search for similar styles across the brand’s product range. At the same time, mobile continues to play an integral role in increasing online sales – allowing consumers to shop when they want, how they want, and on any device. With retailers using a combination of technologies to deliver a competitive and flawless experience to shoppers, ensuring the performance of these applications is mission-critical.”

About the Study: The study surveyed 4,000 UK, US, French and German adult smartphone and tablet owners (1,000 in each market) and was conducted by Atomik Research in June 2015.

John Rakowski is Director of Technology Strategy at AppDynamics.

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Application Performance is Key to Retail Customer Satisfaction

John Rakowski

For today’s always-on consumers, the performance of retail websites and mobile applications is strongly linked to customer satisfaction, loyalty and spend, according to a new study by AppDynamics.

Mobile apps play an increasingly important role in consumers’ lives – 20 percent of respondents admit to making purchases on their phone while at work in front of their computer, and 70 percent said they make more than a quarter of their purchases online.

The AppDynamics report "An App Is Not Enough" indicates that consumer expectations of retail websites and mobile apps are evolving in response to the growth of mobile and emerging technologies, with 70 percent of consumers stating that the performance of a mobile app impacts their perception of the retailer.

According to the report, 67 percent of consumers would be put off shopping with a retailer if they had a negative experience with its app, putting the onus on brands to deliver flawless application performance.

“As the lines between work and personal, digital and physical, continue to blur, retailers must ensure their apps function at all times across multiple platforms in order to retain and nurture always-on consumers,” said Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics. “Technology has transformed the retail landscape significantly over the past decade, and now more than ever, software defines business success – with revenue and reputation often hinging on customer interactions with apps.”

While digital technologies have provided consumers with more choices in how and where they shop, they have never been so time-poor, which may be why 40 percent of those surveyed say they would trial a new app if it promised to deliver a more convenient shopping experience. Furthermore, a third of consumers are now using apps for convenience when they visit a store or to make a swift purchase on the go.

The study, which surveyed 4,000 UK, US, French and German smartphone and tablet owners, also found:

■ 43 percent of consumers want mobile apps that allow them to purchase products while in the store, instead of queuing for a sales assistant.

■ 57 percent would like retail apps to provide store assistants with details of past purchases for a tailored omni-channel experience.

■ 56 percent would be encouraged to visit brick-and-mortar stores if apps provided them with personalized offers when they were close by.

■ If unable to complete a purchase, three quarters of consumers stated that a prompt and personal apology would persuade them to revisit the retailer.

“Today’s consumers expect a seamless shopping experience across online and offline channels, with minimal friction points,” said Paul Hobbs, head of e-commerce at Shop Direct. “This puts increased pressure on retailers to innovate, using the latest technologies to improve and augment the online e-commerce journey so it delivers the thrill of visiting the high street in a more convenient way. As an example, Very.com has recently introduced image recognition technology that allows shoppers to take photos of clothes they like and search for similar styles across the brand’s product range. At the same time, mobile continues to play an integral role in increasing online sales – allowing consumers to shop when they want, how they want, and on any device. With retailers using a combination of technologies to deliver a competitive and flawless experience to shoppers, ensuring the performance of these applications is mission-critical.”

About the Study: The study surveyed 4,000 UK, US, French and German adult smartphone and tablet owners (1,000 in each market) and was conducted by Atomik Research in June 2015.

John Rakowski is Director of Technology Strategy at AppDynamics.

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...