By Mike Shaw, BSM Product Marketing

 Last year, we did a series of in depth interviews with customers (28 of them, actually).  As part of these interviews, we asked if people did proactive user experience monitoring - either using synthetic scripting technology to pretend to be a user, or using a probe on the network to look at the data going to the users' screens and monitoring the response time.

About half the respondents said they did. This ties in with a recent Aberdeen study that found 57% of companies didn't do user experience monitoring.

So, we asked on IT manager who didn't do user experience monitoring, why had he not invested in this technology. "Because we respond very quickly when the first customer rings in", was his response.

And since that day, I've been on a quest to get a magic number. How many minutes, on average,elapses between a business service giving a poor user experience and the first customer calling in. I have only three data points, but no definitive study. The average seems to be about 30 to 45 minutes.

To get another angle, whenever I present to a friendly audience, I'll ask them how often they have called a company when they have had problems with a user interface (e.g. on an ordering web site). Of the 160 people I've asked, just two had actually picked up the phone, and in both  situations, it's been something critical like sorting out a mobile/cell phone bill.

I have another data point. A study by Corporate Executive Board in 2004 found that the average cost to a company of down-time is $1.3m per hour. That's $27,000 per minute.

So, we have 30 to 45 minutes (very rough estimate). We have $27,000 per minute. Being conservative (and very rough), we have a cost of 30 minutes X $27,000  or $81,000 per poor user experience problem. 

Do you have any data on the average time between a poor user experience situation starting and the first customer calling in? If you do, could you please post a comment with the data - it amazes me that such data is not readily available "out there".