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Every Experience Matters: What Makes Us Shout at Computers?
Welcome back to the new Sauce Labs series ‘Every Experience Matters Stat of the Week.” In last week’s edition, we mentioned that about a quarter of consumers encounter an error or bug every day. While this indicated that errors are quite common overall, we didn’t dive deeper into how a customer may react when encountering those bugs. Are customers as forgiving as we might hope? Sadly, that is not the case. The results are dubious, to say the least.
Today’s Every Experience Matters stat is… Nearly half (49%) of all consumers say they’ve closed a browser or shut off a device in frustration when encountering an error
Nearly everyone in their personal life has encountered some sort of error when trying to make a purchase, reserve a table or book a trip. If you are one of the many that grabbed your ball and went home after this frustrating experience, it may not be time to sign up for the anger management classes just yet. You are just one of the 49% of consumers who have reacted to a negative experience by abandoning your transaction.
We can dive deeper and ask, “OK, so half of consumers have abandoned a task, but how long did they wait until they gave up?” Good question! I’m glad you asked, the data suggests that some folks are more tolerant than others. First, the good news. Eleven percent of the brave souls we surveyed are actually willing to wait up to two business days for an error to be addressed before completely giving up. One can only assume that these are the people that live by the motto: patience is a virtue. Unfortunately, on the flip side, 24% are willing to wait less than an hour, 23% are willing to wait 1-15 minutes while 18% are willing to wait no time at all.
Yes, that’s right. Nearly 1 in 5 of your users will jump ship immediately if your software doesn’t work properly the first time. Without diving into heavy financials, we can assume that an 18% drop in conversions is a negative for your business, regardless of industry.
Last week we mentioned that a little over half of your users are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and reload the page up to two times, but in reality, 36% will try it twice, while 17% will reload only once, or not at all.
And while most users will simply abandon a transaction in frustration, we do have data that points to some more colorful reactions to digital bugs. Forty-nine percent of users will shut their computers, but 20 percent will curse or yell and seven percent will actually throw something. Oy!
This leaves two real options for brands looking to protect their reputation. On one hand, they could wage a long and expensive campaign retraining the entire populace on their tolerance for digital failure or they could simply leverage continuous automation testing to prevent these errors from ever happening in the first place.
The quality of experience directly impacts revenue as we will see in next week’s edition of the ‘Every Experience Matters Stat of the Day’ when we will be talking about negative reviews and brand reputation. Long story short, reputation must be protected at all costs. We’ll see you next week.
