Gartner Inc.

05/24/2022 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 05/24/2022 08:42

Regret and Replacement Purchases

As we get closer to our virtual Gartner Tech Growth and Innovation Conference, we are continuing to refine the keynote on the Customer Power Paradox and purchase regret. There is so much to the story that we can't include it all, so here is a bit more of the story. For clients, we'll be going deeper into the data to understand more of the causes and actions you can take around it.

But let's take a look at replacement purchases-when organizations already have a solution in place and decide to replace it. In some ways, you would think this would be an easier, less risky path than purchasing something in a new category, but the instances of high regret are actually greater for replacement purchases (but not as big as for large scale expansions-that is a story for another day).

To try and understand regret and replacement, we can look look at the reasons that the organizations decided to explore a replacement purchase. For all replacements, 57% experienced high regret. When we break that down by the reasons that had the most noticeable impact, it looks like this:

The only reason that was "below the bar" was when the replacement being driven by new requirements that the current product or service could not address. The ones that had the greatest source of regret came when a change was forced (support eliminated, vendor acquired) or secondary reasons to functionality drove the decision.

The surprise for me was replacing because of usability issues. What I suspect is that perspectives on usability for a large scale system deployment may vary widely. So there may be many different opinions.

The high level advice for vendors. If you are in a replacmeent market, focus on helping customers identify and confirm tangible requirements for a replacement decision that points to a clear path to added value. If you are going after replacements based on forced urgency , work with your prospects to identify at least some added capability that will bring value and do everything you can to ease the road to change.

The other situations bear similar decision issues to all purchases-we'll be exploring that at the conference. I hope you can join us (there is a lot more to the show than just the keynote-but that is kinda the center of my universe right now).