Close your eyes for a minute; I want to try an exercise. Imagine you are at your desk in the final leg of a major project, rapidly approaching the finish line. You have done all the research, put together the assets, and are completing the final reviews when suddenly
Your reports are all blank, client data is nowhere to be found, and months’ worth of information seems to have jumped ship in the blink of an eye!
What happened? Where did your masterpiece project go? How can you get it back? Is this the worst day ever?
If this has ever happened to you, you are not alone. Because businesses have come to rely heavily on the latest technologies to function throughout the day, major crashes or even slight hiccups in performance can greatly derail work productivity. These setbacks not only frustrate staff and customers, but also negatively impact revenue streams. Problems all around.
How Bad Is Bad?
A recent study from Compuware Co. examined the impact of failed technology performance for companies across several industries. The research revealed the average short-term financial result of an isolated technology performance glitch is $10.8 million with sales and marketing alone suffering $10.5 million in losses.
Furthermore, executives surveyed said long-term impacts of technology performance failures can be devastating, with 45% having experienced a loss in market share or brand equity. Also, 75% of executives said a major technology performance malfunction has happened more than once at their company.
When examining the departments hit the hardest by the performance failures, the largest cost to business was found at the operational levels. Sales often absorbed the most loss, followed by products and marketing teams.
While a major derailment or prolonged downtime may seem like the worst case scenario, routine technology issues that occur a few times a week prove to be the biggest threat to marketing performance and technology ROI. About 75% of executives experience regular issues despite taking steps to solve the problems, and 90% had to invest more heavily in additional solutions to achieve a major fix.
What Can You Do to Prevent This?
The study found the average time it took companies to return to normal operations after a performance failure was 21 days yes, three whole weeks. When operating normally, there is little wiggle room in most industries to slow down for a few days, much less several weeks. Therefore, companies must be proactive in their research, purchases, and maintenance of marketing technologies to prevent as many performance failures as possible. Otherwise there are a number of negative effects executives will have to deal with on a regular basis including:
- Lost productivity
- Lost sales revenue
- Failure to meet service level agreements
- Temporary systems or manual processes
- Hiring additional staff
- Products gone to waste
When selecting marketing technology solutions, research options that require no installation, require no maintenance and updating, and provide guaranteed reliability. DialogTech’s call tracking, routing, and management solutions offer these benefits, as well as expert guidance on what to look for when comparing solutions. One important feature is operability in the cloud. When technologies are cloud-based, there is no investment in hardware required and the solutions are easily integrated with existing resources and solutions (such as computers and phones).
Another way to work around performance glitches is to select technologies that are complementary to one another. Even if your company cannot invest in an entire suite of solutions at once, make sure the technologies you add on as you grow are able to seamlessly integrate with existing solutions and platforms. For example, call tracking technology should work hand-in-hand with Google’s Universal Analytics to provide an overarching picture of marketing ROI. If the technologies are designed to work together, there should be less performance failures during integration or routine operations.
Learn from Past Mistakes
Aside from proactively planning ahead, Compuware Co. recommends developing protocol to measure technology performance regularly and conduct an impact analysis with every failure until more reliable technologies are in place. Staff in all departments should perform these tasks to keep tabs on how solutions are helping or hurting operations.
All information gathered from each issue should be shared across the company in proper context. The impact of each problem should also be factored into future marketing investment decisions so executives are asking the right questions when adopting new solutions. Making long-term adjustments is significantly more beneficial to an organization’s bottom line than opting for the short-term fix that provides temporary relief.
For more tips on how to select the most reliable call tracking technology, check out our Buyer’s Guide to Call Tracking Software for Marketers resource.