The trust deficit: When support feels like abandonment

The most striking theme from our discussions was what one former service provider executive described as “sheer distrust, almost verging on hatred” of upstream service providers. This isn’t hyperbole—it reflects a genuine breakdown in the relationship between retail IT teams and the vendors they depend on.

“We didn’t have any visibility beyond ‘is it up, right now?’ There was no way to replay the weekend, spot patterns, or justify issues—and every fix was manual,” explained an IT Manager at a healthcare distribution company, encapsulating the frustration felt by many in the room.

The numbers support this sentiment. In our survey of 122 networking professionals at a major European technology conference, 47% of IT decision makers singled out network visibility as being the most important area for improvement in their operations, despite 73% already using third-party monitoring solutions. When we asked retail technology professionals specifically, 83% said poor connectivity directly impacts their role, yet only 26% of their organisations calculate the actual damages from network issues.

The root cause? A fundamental mismatch of priorities. As one roundtable participant noted, retail “isn’t even in the top 10 of sectors” that major telecoms providers care about. Meanwhile, for a retail business, what amounts to ‘pennies’ for a major telecommunications provider can represent a critical revenue-threatening outage.

The commodity trap: When price becomes the only differentiator

Our post-event analysis revealed a troubling pattern: retail organisations consistently approach network procurement like they’re buying broadband for home use, focusing almost exclusively on technical specifications and price rather than service quality and business outcomes.

“They come to you with a very fixed requirement of what it is that they want… they give you basically a part list that you have to work on,” observed a former service provider executive during our follow-up discussion. “Very rarely does it get to the point of discussion about service and service quality.”

This commoditisation creates a race to the bottom where providers strip out expensive human support to meet price expectations. The result? Service providers can only afford to deliver bare-minimum technical solutions, leaving retail IT teams to manage complex integrations and troubleshooting with minimal support.

The irony is stark: IT teams are charged with the need to provide enterprise-level reliability whilst only having the budget for consumer-grade service models, leading to frustration when they don’t receive the white-glove support expected by management teams.

The business value disconnect: IT’s struggle to prove worth

Perhaps the most fundamental challenge revealed in our discussions is retail IT’s inability to connect technology spend with measurable business outcomes. This disconnect permeates every aspect of the industry’s infrastructure challenges and perpetuates a cycle of underinvestment and reactive management.

“IT teams frankly don’t do a particularly great job of fighting their corner internally in an organisation and don’t think of themselves or don’t essentially sell their importance and what they do internally,” noted one industry expert during our analysis.

This problem manifests in several critical ways:

1. The Quantification Gap: While our industry research shows that the typical retailer loses a median $9.95 million per year due to IT and network outages, with nearly a third (31%) of surveyed retail/consumer organisations reporting that critical business app outages cost them more than $500,000 per hour. Most organisations don’t track these metrics internally, however. Going back to our survey of retail IT professionals, a staggering 39% said that they don’t track revenue loss from IT issues.
2. The Investment Paradox: Without clear visibility into the cost of poor IT performance, retail organisations consistently underinvest in infrastructure improvements whilst overspending on emergency fixes and workarounds. IT teams report that more than 30% of their time is spent in reactive “firefighting” mode—time that could be redirected towards strategic initiatives if proper observability were in place.
3. The Communication Chasm: IT professionals often speak in technical terms about bandwidth, latency, and system performance, whilst business leaders think in terms of customer experience, revenue impact, and competitive advantage. This language barrier means that critical infrastructure investments get categorised as “IT costs” rather than “business enablement,” making them easy targets during budget reviews.
4. The Credibility Crisis: Without data to demonstrate proactive problem prevention, IT teams are judged primarily on their response to visible failures. This creates a perception that IT is reactive and non-strategic, further undermining their ability to secure investment in better tools and processes.

The organisations breaking out of this cycle are those that have learnt to translate technical metrics into business language. As one major online grocery retailer’s IT leader explained, their team is now “in everyone’s business” because “people understand they need to loop IT in at an early stage because the more information they have the better and quicker they can solve problems.”

Historically, IT departments have not had to care about direct business impact, but that is changing now. IT has to be seen to help the bottom line in a tangible way, and IT professionals need to get better at ‘PR-ing’ themselves to demonstrate strategic value both at the operational level and in the boardroom.

---

The jigsaw puzzle problem: When nobody owns the outcome

Perhaps the most operationally damaging issue our roundtables identified is what participants called the “jigsaw puzzle” of providers. In an effort to control and minimise costs, retail organisations typically work with multiple suppliers—different vendors for networking, security, cloud services, and support. When problems arise, accountability becomes impossible to establish.

“Each supplier will pass off responsibility for an issue on a different partner, so in-house IT teams end up having to force a fix themselves,” noted one participant. This finger-pointing dynamic leaves retail IT teams in an impossible position: they lack the direct relationships and technical access to resolve issues, and yet they’re ultimately responsible for keeping systems running.

Our survey data shows the impact: 33% of retail technology professionals report that issues are recurring or not resolved effectively, suggesting that root causes aren’t being addressed—just symptoms temporarily patched.

The scale challenge: When every store opening creates “55 new problems”

Modern retail expansion creates unique IT challenges that traditional service providers aren’t equipped to handle efficiently. As one participant noted, every new store opening—particularly for smaller retailers—creates “55 new problems” from an IT perspective, because providers are optimised for larger-scale deployments.

This has led to some creative workarounds: multiple retailers are now opening stores on 5G networks because “the lead time of getting infrastructure in place to support the store is never met, the survey is done but follow up never happens.”

The underlying issue is that service providers’ operational models favour enterprise clients with hundreds or thousands of locations, leaving mid-market retailers in a service gap where they’re too small for dedicated enterprise support but too complex for standardised SMB solutions.

The financial reality: Quantifying the true cost of poor visibility

While many of our roundtable participants struggled to articulate the financial impact of their IT challenges, industry data reveals the stark reality. Recent high-profile incidents illustrate the scale: in 2025 alone, major UK retailers lost up to £73 million per minute in the first 10 minutes of payment systems going offline during cyberattacks.

More concerning, 37% of retailers face high-impact outages at least weekly, with 55% taking over 30 minutes just to detect the problem—before they can even begin remediation. This visibility gap makes it nearly impossible for IT teams to justify investments in better infrastructure or monitoring tools.

The data shows that, on average, customers only tolerate up to 6 minutes of payment disruption before becoming frustrated and/or abandoning their purchase, with 22 minutes being an upper limit. This is a considerable risk considering a study in the UK shows the average length of an outage for retail organisations is 4 hours. The knock-on effects for the bottom line of a retail business are even more severe when 1 in 3 consumers report that they will stop using a brand they previously viewed positively after just one bad experience.

The internal communication challenge: When IT becomes a black box

Beyond vendor relationships, our discussions revealed significant internal communication challenges. IT teams often struggle with poor-quality support tickets—receiving reports like “it’s not working” without useful diagnostic information—whilst end users become frustrated with seemingly unresponsive technical support.

This problem occurs because access to monitoring information is siloed and only accessible by high level IT support and operations staff. To further compound the issue, traditional monitoring solutions are highly technical, meaning that data is not readily understandable to non-subject matter experts.

The answer to internal communication issues in relation to IT is to democratise data access using modern service observability solutions. Giving users and first line support readily understandable and strictly relevant data about their services improves the quality of tickets and conversations. Improved communication means better meantime-to-resolution and more trust between IT staff and the users they support.

---

The path forward: From survival mode to strategic leadership

The conversations revealed IT teams caught between external service provider failures and internal pressure to prove value. But those who’ve invested in proper observability tools are finding their way out of constant firefighting mode.

Modern service observability solutions bring unified visibility of multiple services. They prioritise relevancy and comprehensibility over complexity and absolute depth of data. At their best, monitoring capabilities are combined with hyper-relevant alerting and cross-technology reporting to ensure that actionable data is accessible to whoever needs it.

Organisations that have moved beyond basic monitoring to comprehensive service observability report dramatic improvements: 60% reduction in support escalations, 80% reduction in time-to-problem-source, and 100% increase in IT support capacity.

Breaking the business value barrier

The most successful retail IT teams are those that have learnt to frame their work in terms of business outcomes rather than technical achievements. They focus on metrics that matter to the broader organisation:

1. Revenue Protection: Instead of reporting “99.9% uptime,” they quantify “prevented £2.3M in lost sales through proactive issue resolution.”
2. Operational Efficiency: Rather than discussing “network optimisation,” they demonstrate “reduced checkout times by 15 seconds per transaction, improving customer satisfaction scores.”
3. Cost Avoidance: Beyond technical metrics, they calculate “avoided £150,000 in emergency support costs through predictive maintenance.”
4. Strategic Enablement: They position IT investments as business capabilities: “new service observability platform enables expansion to 50 additional stores without proportional IT staff increase.”

This shift from technical reporting to business impact creates a virtuous cycle: better metrics lead to increased credibility, which enables larger investments, which deliver measurable results, which further enhance IT’s strategic positioning within the organisation.

What this means for retail IT leaders

Our roundtables revealed an industry at an inflection point. The traditional approach of managing vendor relationships reactively whilst operating with minimal visibility is no longer sustainable in an environment where every minute of downtime can cost tens of thousands of pounds and strategic IT investment can be a crucial point of differentiation for customer experience.

The retail IT leaders who will thrive are those who:

• Shift from price-only procurement to service-inclusive buying, recognising that the cheapest option rarely delivers acceptable business outcomes
• Implement comprehensive service observability early, before problems compound into crisis management situations
• Build internal credibility through data-driven reporting, moving beyond “keeping the lights on” to demonstrating measurable business value
• Take ownership of outcomes rather than accepting finger-pointing from fragmented vendor ecosystems
• Master the language of business impact, translating technical metrics into revenue, cost, and competitive advantage terms

---

These insights emerged from Highlight’s ongoing series of retail IT roundtables and industry research, including surveys of 183 professionals across retail technology and networking events. The discussions continue as we work to bridge the gap between retail IT challenges and practical solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes.