By James Harvey, Executive CTO EMEAR, AppDynamics

With Christmas on the horizon, IT departments across the retail sector will be gearing up for what has come to be the most gruelling period of their year. Massive spikes in demand on applications and digital services have traditionally seen technologists working round the clock, huddled together in war rooms trying to ensure IT systems don’t fall over under the strain.

However, while technologists might not want to hear it on the back of what has already been a massively challenging 18 months, the pressure on IT departments to deliver faultless digital experiences will rise to a whole new level this holiday season.

Pressure on retail IT departments coming from all sides

One reason for this increased burden on IT departments is the fact that the spikes in online shopping are set to be bigger and last longer this holiday season. Consumers will likely want to get their shopping completed earlier this year, aware that supply chain issues could delay delivery on some products. This means that technologists will need to manage sudden spikes in demand on applications and infrastructure for several weeks, as opposed to just a few days as in previous years. 

However, the biggest increase in pressure on IT departments will come from dramatically heightened consumer expectations for seamless digital experiences. People all over the world have had no choice but to rely on digital services across almost every area of their lives while living in lockdown, and they’re now using a wider range of applications on a much more regular basis. In doing so, they’ve been exposed to the very best, most innovative digital experiences available across every sector – whether that’s retail, banking or healthcare. They’ve seen for themselves what some brands are now offering in terms of personalization and performance, and they see no reason why they shouldn’t be getting this everywhere.

In the recent App Attention Index 2021 report from AppDynamics, research showed that 71% of consumers expect an enhanced experience. So, pressure is on for technologists to meet these heightened expectations while the risks of failing are severe. It’s no surprise to see that the majority of consumers are no longer willing to tolerate poor IT performance – in fact, 68% consider brands that offer a poor digital experience to be ‘disrespectful’.

It may be holiday season but consumers are in no mood to forgive and forget when they encounter a poor digital experience – 57% state that brands have only one shot to impress them and that if their digital service doesn’t perform, they won’t use them again. This finding alone should be enough to send shivers down the spine of IT leaders – if their infrastructure is unable to manage dramatic spikes in demand and they can’t deliver faultless experiences, then they risk seeing more than half of their customers leave them, possibly forever.

Just in case they needed it, the recent service disruption at Facebook will undoubtedly have served as a stark reminder to technologists of the risks of IT performance issues. In a poll that we conducted in the wake of those events, 87% of global IT decision-makers reported that they are now concerned about the potential for a major outage in their business and the resulting disruption to their applications and digital services. And significantly, 84% of technologists stated that they are coming under increasing pressure from their organization’s leadership to prevent a major performance issue or outage.

So IT departments find themselves under the pump, with pressure building from both customers and business leaders to ensure faultless digital experiences.

Visibility is key to optimize IT performance during the holiday season 

But as anybody that works in retail technology will know, just as consumer expectations have been spiralling, the difficult task of optimizing IT performance has become far more challenging. Accelerated digital transformation and a dramatic increase in cloud computing in response to the pandemic, have left IT departments attempting to manage an ever-more fragmented patchwork of legacy and cloud technologies. And the unfortunate reality is that most IT departments simply don’t have the tools and insight they need to make informed decisions around technology performance issues. In fact, only 27% of technologists feel entirely confident that their current monitoring tools are adequate to manage IT performance and deliver seamless digital experiences.

This is why retail technologists need real-time visibility into IT performance up and down the IT stack, from customer-facing applications right through to core infrastructure. Only with genuine full-stack observability do they stand a chance to cut through the data noise and be able to identify and fix performance issues before they impact customers.

But during this current holiday season, when demand on digital services will be so high and fluctuating so much, technologists in the retail sector still need more. While they’re being drowned by IT performance data from every corner of their IT infrastructure, they have to quickly understand which IT issues matter most for the business. Therefore, retail technologists urgently need to connect full-stack observability with real-time business metrics, so that they can pinpoint and prioritize the issues that pose the biggest risk to customer experience. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you’re looking at 100 performance issues, but if you instantly know that only a couple of them really have the potential to impact customers then you can immediately focus your efforts in the right places.

This type of business lens on IT performance makes it far easier for retailers to consistently optimize IT performance, identify and fix IT performance issues before they impact the customer, and deliver the faultless digital experience they now demand. And crucially for those technologists already in the midst of holiday season madness, it can significantly ease the pressure that will undoubtedly be engulfing their IT department in the coming weeks.