A lack of real-time information is damaging organisations’ ability to deliver customer service, as they fail to detect problems fast enough.
Two thirds of the UK businesses surveyed by Progress Software said they only became aware of problems once customers reported them, rather than proactively spotting and dealing with issues before customers were affected.
“If you look at a business or consumer process, we expect it to happen in pseudo real-time,” said Dr. Giles Nelson, director of strategy at Progress Software. “That means more pressure on organisations to get a better handle on their customers, to interact with them once an order is submitted, to track that order and then doing something about it if there’s an issue. If you don’t repair issues quickly, then they get more costly as time goes by.”
The survey found that telcos were particularly poor at dealing with problems swiftly – 77% of the telco respondents said they only became aware of problems after customers alerted them. “People can easily move from telco to telco, so if they’re not to simply become just a data access point to the internet, they’ve got to try and do better on the service they deliver,” said Nelson.
The lack of real-time information was found to impact decision making. An overwhelming 94% of respondents said that real-time information was important to their business, yet only 8% were able to view real-time updates.
