Often times website outages cost a company money, and depending on the type of website this can calculation can be simple or difficult. If an e-commerce website goes down for an hour one can simply use the normal volumes to calculate the cost, but for reservation systems this can be more complex. For instance, if an airlines reservation system goes down the real cost both lost bookings and the cost of call operators.
“Of course when the web goes down, people are going to turn to the call centre and that’s why we were for a brief period this morning getting swamped there,” said Richard Bartrem, WestJet’s vice-president of culture and communications. (via Calgary Herald)
The cost of having a human being take a phone call for reservations is much greater than that of a website booking. A quick look for articles yielded this insight from Travel Procurement:
Cost savings is a major driver. PhoCusWright (3) estimated a self-service booking without manual intervention runs between $4 and $8, while a call center phone reservation can be between $15 and $65. (via Travel Procurement)
So not only did WestJet lose some bookings, but they also incurred greater costs in salaries and phone bills. Something to take into consideration next time you’re trying to calculate the cost of your website going down.
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