________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
REDUCING OUTAGE IMPACT
Al Kingsley reveals how to deal with five-minute IT issues that can derail a next-day delivery promise
In an age when customers expect nextday delivery, reliability, and affordability from their businesses and retailers, no system runs fault-free forever. It is less a case of nothing ever going wrong, and more about how quickly it gets put right.
Technology that runs smoothly is invisible to customers, but that changes the moment it fails, and the issue needs to be addressed swiftly. Faults in retail can manifest in many ways whether in-store or online: a till goes down, a payment terminal gets stuck on the never-ending‘ processing’ circle, a website checkout fails at the final step, or a customer is told an item is in stock when it is not.
Individually, these issues are minor, but the impact can reach beyond what you might initially think.
A recent Retail Gazette and Gamma report found that 37 percent of retailers face high-impact outages every week. How a business defines‘ impact’ will vary with its size, footprint, IT support, and the proportionate cost of an outage. Nonetheless, the same principle applies to all retailers: the best IT systems are the ones you never notice.
16