Zapier says fragmented requests cost teams revenue

Zapier has published research finding that 63% of operations professionals say missing or delayed internal requests have delayed or cost their teams revenue. The survey points to heavier losses among teams using three or more request platforms.

The findings are based on a survey of 801 US professionals who handle a moderate to high volume of tickets or requests, including project managers, operations leaders, IT leaders, and small business owners. The study examined how internal requests move through organisations and where delays emerge before work begins.

The data suggests fragmented systems are a major source of friction. More than half of teams, 54%, receive requests across three or four channels, while 93% of respondents said those requests routinely arrive with missing information.

That missing context appears to create a significant administrative burden. Some 42% of operations professionals said they spend six to 15 minutes organising a single request when it comes in from multiple sources, while 32% said they spend more than 15 minutes figuring out what the request is asking for.

The revenue effects were not limited to occasional delays. Among those surveyed, 30% said their teams had experienced both delayed revenue and lost revenue because of missing or delayed internal requests.

Platform burden

Teams using fewer request platforms reported faster handling times. Those using one or two platforms were 81% more likely to process a request in under five minutes than teams relying on three or more, according to the survey.

The same divide appeared in the reported financial impact. Nearly half, 49%, of teams using one or two platforms said they had never lost revenue because of missing or delayed requests, compared with 25% of teams using three or more platforms.

The report also indicates that the strain extends beyond lost time. More than a third of respondents, 36%, said the mental fatigue of managing requests outweighs the effort of completing the work itself.

Another 44% said they consistently chase updates and approvals, while 41% reported regular interruptions from follow-ups and context switching. Zapier said this pattern reflects process design problems rather than individual performance.

Request volume adds to the pressure. Half of task-focused leaders, including project managers, operations professionals, and small business owners, said they handle at least 26 internal requests, tickets, or tasks on an average workday. A quarter said they deal with 51 or more.

Missing details

Incomplete requests were a near-universal complaint in the survey. The most common gap, cited by 48% of respondents, was the lack of a clear description of what was being requested.

When work falls through, the consequences often spread across teams. Some 46% of respondents said a coworker or manager has to step in, 31% said other requests are delayed, and 29% reported burnout on the team.

Emily Mabie, Senior AI Automation Engineer at Zapier, said the issue often begins before the work itself starts.

"Teams aren't drowning because the work is harder. They're drowning because the work shows up in five different inboxes with half the context missing. You can't hire your way out of that. You have to fix the intake layer so requests get organised, routed, and started without a person stitching the pieces together by hand," Mabie said.

The research was conducted by Centiment for Zapier among US respondents. Participants were screened to ensure they were professionals managing a moderate to high flow of internal tasks or requests.

Mabie said businesses do not necessarily need to replace all of their existing systems to address the problem.

"Most teams aren't going to rip out all of their tools, and they shouldn't. Email, Slack, ticketing, project management - they all have a job. The work is connecting them so a request can land in any one of them and still get triaged, assigned, and tracked the same way. That's what shrinks the cleanup tax on the team and frees them up to do actual strategic work," Mabie said.