After Greggs became the fourth major business in the UK to face disruptions due to IT issues in less than a week, what can retailers do differently to avoid tech meltdowns in the future?
On Saturday, global fast-food giant McDonald’s was forced to shut restaurants in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Japan due to an IT outage, then two of the UK’s largest supermarkets were struck by tech difficulties of their own.
Sainsbury’s issued an apology to customers across the country as it struggled to fulfil most online grocery deliveries due to technical issues caused by an overnight software update at the weekend.
The technical failure also affected Sainsbury’s in-store contactless payments. Staff waited outside some of the retailer’s 600 supermarkets and 800 convenience stores in the UK to inform consumers that they could only pay in cash.
Tesco had to cancel “a small number of orders” on Saturday due to a technical glitch earlier that day, which it said was not connected to the issue affecting Sainsbury’s.
“Even the smallest routine software updates have the potential to completely derail everything”
Zeb Winzenreid, Applause
Fast-forward four days and Britain’s largest bakery chain Greggs posted signs reading “Oh Crumbs!” on store windows as it shut doors for customers after reporting that IT issues had crippled its card payments system.
In a statement later on Wednesday, Greggs said: “We have now resolved the technical issue that affected tills in some of our shops earlier this morning. The majority of shops affected are now able to take card and cash payments again and we expect the issue to be fully resolved shortly. We apologise for the inconvenience this may have caused our customers.”
We’re told that these issues are not connected but four major businesses reporting technical failures within a week seems strange, to say the least.
Max Watson, retail technology lead at tech and software firm Mindera, which works with businesses including Dunelm, THG and Kingfisher, says the only strange thing is that we don’t see more tech disruptions.
“I think it’s a surprise this doesn’t happen more,” he says. “People are rolling out software faster each year, particularly retailers, to gain competitive advantage in such a tight market. It’s a case of balancing that speed and rolling out new features versus investing in software modernisation and robust testing. And from the descriptions that we’ve been given so far, it appears these have been avoidable problems that have been corrected pretty quickly afterwards.”
Damage prevention
Sorting the issues out as quickly as possible is key, according to crowd testing company Applause senior director Zeb Winzenried, or retailers risk damaging their shopper relationships.
“Even the smallest routine software updates have the potential to completely derail everything, including payments made online, in-store and through omnichannel experiences,” he says.
“Retailers should take all updates as seriously as new product launches and integrate testing into sprints. Checkout failures can be very damaging to customer trust in your brand.”
“Modern retail systems are increasingly complex and if not designed well can be fragile”
Max Watson, Mindera
But as a new tech innovation hits the retail sector every few weeks, what can retailers do to stay away from technical failures and avoid losing customer goodwill?
“Greggs’ IT glitch serves as an important reminder for any business of the need for full visibility over all devices in a network – not just traditional computers and laptops – so issues can be easily identified and rectified or even prevented from occurring entirely,” says enterprise software firm SOTI UK and Ireland, director of sales Faki Saadi.
“This starts with more strategic device implementation and ensuring that the strategy can scale effectively, but businesses may also want to consider moving away from basic device management solutions, which lack many of the features they need, towards a more comprehensive device intelligence offering.”
Connection failure
Mindera’s Watson says retailers using legacy software, which has been built organically over the years, are the ones that should be investing in systems that are less vulnerable to failure.
“Modern retail systems are increasingly complex and if not designed well can be fragile,” says Watson.
“There needs to be an investment in making sure that retailers modernise their systems but, at the very least, that they have robust automated testing in place to be able to make certain releases that go out are not going to fall over.”
As for anyone who was hoping for a juicy retail conspiracy theory to be unearthed by these issues, Watson says you shouldn’t get your hopes up.
“It’s unusual to see quite a few of them face problems in a very short space of time. I’ve seen other commentators saying that it seems like they could be connected but I don’t think there’s any evidence for that at the moment.”
“It just appears like it’s four entirely separate incidents. Though none of them are giving away much information about what’s actually happened under the covers.”
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