Experts assessed the impact of technical failures in the services on user choice

When the site freezes during payment and it takes several minutes to log in to the app, users are rarely willing to take a long time to figure out the reasons. According to a study by the Dela PR agency, which was reviewed by Izvestia on June 30, one in three Russians turns to competitors when the service is unstable, and 32.5% have refused to buy at least once due to technical problems.

In words, users seem to be quite patient. Almost half of the respondents (47.5%) said they were ready to wait as long as necessary for the website or application to load. Another 21% are willing to wait a few minutes, and 20% are willing to wait a few seconds. However, in practice, patience has a limit: a quarter of respondents have closed the page several times due to problems with the service, and 10% encounter this regularly. Only 31% reported that they had not experienced such situations.

Users are most annoyed by freezes and technical failures — 65% of respondents named them. Intrusive advertising and pop—ups came in second place (45%), and the need to re-enter data came in third (37.5%). Respondents also complained about difficulties with access to services (36%), payment errors (35%), inconvenient authorization (25%) and lack of necessary information (17.5%).

If the service starts to run erratically, users react in different ways. A quarter continue to try to complete the purchase, 22.5% postpone it for later, and 15% make a decision depending on the situation. At the same time, 62.5% of respondents more or less agree with the statement that they are ready to switch to competitors if using the service is inconvenient or it works intermittently. When access to the service is completely lost, almost half of users (47.5%) prefer to wait for work to be restored. Another 22.5% are trying to solve the problem on their own, 20% are looking for another way to get access, and 10% immediately switch to an alternative service.

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Over the past two years, the attitude towards technical failures has become more demanding. A quarter of the respondents reported that they had become less tolerant of such problems, and another 10% were significantly less tolerant. At the same time, 33% believe that they have become calmer about failures, while for 32.5% the situation has not changed.

Technical issues affect not only current sales, but also brand attitudes. Almost half of users (47.5%) admit that they start to feel worse about the company if failures are repeated regularly. At the same time, the audience expects not so much an impeccable job as an understandable reaction to the problem. For 47.5%, the prompt assistance of the support service is important, 37.5% are waiting for timely notifications of failures and the progress of their elimination, and 22.5% consider it necessary to explain the reasons and apologize from the company.

"Failure by itself rarely causes a customer to leave. The cumulative effect has a much stronger effect on the attitude towards the brand. Users are willing to forgive a one-time mistake, but begin to lose trust when the problem repeats or the company does not explain it in any way. In this sense, technical stability works as an element of reputation," said Yana Voronina, Director of Development at Dela PR communications agency.

Anton Bukarev, an expert in the field of mobile development, told Izvestia on May 2 that the same mobile application can exhibit different performance depending on the device.: It works quickly and stably on one smartphone, while on the other it freezes, slows down or does not start at all. According to him, the performance of the processor, the amount of RAM, the features of the graphics subsystem, the limitations of the operating system, the operation of the camera and other hardware components, as well as the behavior of the system in the background, most strongly affect the operation of the application.