Digital experience is now key to a stress-free, fun festive period – and it’s down to application owners to deliver it

By James Harvey, CTO Advisor EMEA, Cisco Observability

The holidays are a wonderful time for people across the world, a chance to spend quality time with friends and family. And within every household, there are those unique traditions and rituals that make the festive period so special – the way gifts are exchanged, the food that’s eaten, the funny stories and games that are played.

But one thing that is now consistent across all families is the central role that applications and digital services play over the holidays. Whether it’s watching a classic Christmas movie, listening to those favourite festive tunes, ordering a last-minute gift, or connecting with distant relatives, people are relying on applications.

At Cisco, we recently surveyed over 12,000 global consumers, exploring how people will be using digital services over the holiday season this year. And we found that 63% of people now believe that applications and digital services are important in having an enjoyable holiday.

However, with people now so heavily reliant on applications for almost every aspect of their celebrations, the research also revealed the extent to which they are concerned about these applications not performing as they should. More than half (53%) of consumers admit that they are worried about the implication that an application or digital service not working would have on their family holiday.

Bad digital experiences – the stuff of holiday nightmares

The digital services that are most likely to be used over the holiday period are for entertainment (76% of consumers expect to use entertainment applications), tools for connecting with friends and family (74%), retail (69%), utilities (69%), and news and information (66%). Other popular applications include food delivery services for a well-earned takeaway, collaboration and productivity tools – to finish off work or study ahead of the holiday – and health and wellbeing applications, perhaps for some much-needed meditation to escape the stresses of those large family gatherings!

Overall, 60% of global consumers report that they expect to be using more applications and digital services this holiday season than in previous years. However, while people will be leaning on applications like never before, many have grave concerns about these digital services letting them down when they need them most. Indeed, consumers point to a number of application failure scenarios which now sit alongside travel delays, under-cooked turkeys and family feuds as potential holiday nightmares.

Most of all, consumers are worried about the impact of a banking application failing so that they can’t make an important payment or transfer, or a messaging platform going down so they can’t speak to friends and family that they won’t be with during the holidays. Other fears include an online retailer’s application not working properly so they can’t buy a last-minute gift or order last-minute ingredients for their holiday cooking. Whatever it is, 45% of people state that if an application or digital service doesn’t perform, it could ruin their holiday.

Application owners must avoid turning customers into the Grinch!

Of course, most people usually feel a bit anxious and stressed ahead of holiday celebrations, wanting to ensure things run smoothly and everybody has a great time. But these tensions have reached a new level, with 40% of consumers acknowledging that they will find it harder to enjoy themselves as much as they otherwise would if they encounter a bad digital experience.

Where people do encounter a problem when using digital services, their reactions will be strong. They’ll get stressed and angry, and they’ll vent about the issue to friends and family. More than a quarter (26%) of consumers admit that they’ll start acting like the Grinch!

It may be the holiday season but people will be completely unforgiving towards digital services that let them down – and to the brands behind these services. Whether it’s slow loading pages, payment issues or downtime, seasonal goodwill will disappear. Many claim that they will immediately delete a poorly performing application and never use it again. They’ll switch to an alternative without a second thought.

Application owners need to take stock and ensure that their applications are ready to cope with unprecedented levels of traffic over the holiday season. They have a golden opportunity to attract new customers and ramp up sales over the holidays, but a single slip up in application performance could see consumers walking away en masse, leading to a substantial loss of revenue and reputation.

This is why it’s now so important for organisations in all industries to implement an application observability solution, to ensure that their IT teams are able to rapidly identify and remediate issues before they impact end users. Crucially, with application observability, technologists can correlate application availability, performance and security data with key business metrics so that they can prioritise those issues which could do most damage to digital experience.

All over the world, consumers are gearing up for a fun-filled festive period, and applications are at the heart of their plans. Brands need to move quickly to ensure that their applications and digital services provide customers with exceptional, seamless and secure digital experiences and give customers the holiday they’re dreaming of.