IT Professionals

IT departments celebrate while buyers experience remorse

Billy MacInnes finds a wealth of ennui following big equipment spends
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Image: Shutterstock/Dennis

9 August 2022

We’ve all felt buyer’s remorse at some point in our lives. Some people have probably experienced it more than the rest of us, depending on just how much stuff they buy. For anybody uncertain whether they’ve ever felt it, Wikipedia has a useful definition: “Buyer’s remorse is the sense of regret after having made a purchase. It is frequently associated with the purchase of an expensive item such as a vehicle or real estate.”

Personally, I don’t think people are as exclusive in their feelings of buyer’s remorse as Wikipedia seems to think. You can experience it over anything. An everyday example, for example, is those knock-off charging cables you pick up in a mobile phone shop or a petrol station that stop working within days.

My thoughts turned to the subject of buyer’s remorse when I found a press release from Gartner that revealed 56% of organisations had a high degree of “purchase regret” over their largest tech-related purchase in the last two years.

The result was contained in a survey of 1,120 respondents in North America, Western Europe, and Asia/Pacific seeking to understand how organisations approached large-scale buying efforts for enterprise technology.

Commenting on the findings, Hank Barnes, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, said: “The high regret feelings are at their peak for tech buyers that have not started implementation, indicating significant frustration with the buying experience.”

This could have significant ramifications. The survey found organisations that felt a high level of regret over their purchase took seven to 10 months longer to complete the purchase. “Slow purchase decisions can lead to frustrated teams, wasted time and resources and even, potentially, slower growth for the company,” Barnes added.

The situation was probably exacerbated by the fact 67% of people involved in technology-buying decisions are not in IT. According to Gartner, this is creating a new chasm between organisations that are confident adopters and buyers of technology and the vast majority that are not.

My gut instinct is those people buying technology that aren’t in IT are likely to make up the bulk of the customers experiencing buyer’s remorse. The reason they are more likely to be disappointed is that they probably over-estimate the capabilities of the technology. I’m not saying they are unrealistic about the technology, more that the impression they are given of the technology tends towards the utopian.

When it comes to asking why they might think that way, the answer is clearly because someone nudged them in that particular direction. That someone is either the person who made the technology or the person who sold it. After all, it’s close to impossible for someone to suffer from buyer’s remorse if they buy something that matches their expectations.

Which brings us again to the question: who sets those expectations? Maybe they should do something about that?

Conversely, the reason I think people in IT are less likely to suffer from buyer’s remorse is that prior experience of buying IT makes them better prepared for the reality. Their expectations have been forged by their experiences. They’re too hardened to feel any remorse if things don’t go perfectly. In fact, they probably expect things not to go perfectly.

The task for vendors and partners is to manage the expectations of the 56% of buyers who end up feeling remorseful. If they get it right, no one needs to feel any disappointment.

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