How can a Digital Experience Monitoring Tool Analyze an Application’s Performance and CX?

With digitization having an overarching presence in every aspect of our lives and the economies of nations, it is important to understand how the same is benefiting end-users. It is no one’s argument that technology alone can provide solutions for all intractable problems. Care has to be taken to ensure the technology is adaptable, easy-to-use, secure, and high-performing for the end-users. This is because the end-user experience is ultimately what matters as far as the outcome of digitization for enterprises goes. It helps to drive customer acquisition and retention - the holy grail that every enterprise seeks. Further, with more enterprises migrating their assets to the cloud and an increasing number of people working from home, it has become a challenge to keep track of things on a real-time basis. This is where digital experience monitoring (DEM) enters the scene to monitor user experience, detect performance issues, and improve processes, among others.

What is digital experience monitoring (DEM)?

The process of digital experience monitoring enables enterprises to analyze the efficacy of their processes, services, and applications. It helps to bridge the gap between how an application performs in real-time and how the customers use it. This way, it offers an insight into the whole digital customer experience. As a hybrid capability blending end-user experience and infrastructure monitoring, it helps connect software deployments, IT purchases, and service provisioning, among other elements of a business.

The comprehensive DEM process uses metrics like net promoter score and revenue to measure the success of any enterprise in delivering superior user experiences. If the conventional tools for monitoring performance (and other parameters) are mostly from a technology perspective, a digital experience assurance tool can help to understand the user perspective. Even though statistics point out its increased adoption by enterprises,15% to 70% (2020 to 2025) and generating revenue of between $600 million and $800 million at present (Source: Gartner).

Why is digital experience monitoring important for enterprises?

Thanks to digitization, the various arms of a business enterprise have become increasingly intertwined. The synergy unleashed by the process of digitization aims at achieving a seamless customer journey. But does this happen all the time? Experience suggests that the IT operations involved in managing the front-end and back-end of any enterprise are not always maintained and operated by a single centralized entity.

Instead, in most cases, specialized teams manage the functioning of individual departments within the IT landscape of an enterprise. These teams may include cyber security, digital marketing, web development, and social business, among others. These teams, in most cases, work independently in silos with their own intrinsic communication systems and jargon. To achieve superior customer experience assurance, all cogs in the wheel as mentioned above must operate seamlessly. However, things can often go wrong for the customer journey, with issues such as system latency, outages, disruptions, or downtime rearing their ugly heads.

A digital experience assurance tool can help identify the issues, glitches, or vulnerabilities plaguing the system and contribute to the outages, latency, downtime, or disruptions. It is only after assessing the root causes of such issues that the tool can recommend suitable solutions for mitigation. Since the digital customer experience platform combines both human and machine-enabled interactions, the solutions offered for performance monitoring are optimal. No wonder many business enterprises are adopting DEM instead of the traditional way of monitoring the end-user experience.

Analyzing the efficacy of an enterprise’s applications and services

The real capability of any digital experience platform lies in analyzing the efficacy of the IT infrastructure, services, and applications of an enterprise. This can be done by implementing activities such as real user monitoring, synthetic transaction monitoring, endpoint monitoring, and network visibility. Let us discuss these in some detail:

Real-user monitoring: It entails capturing the performance data from an application’s perspective without installing any device at the customer’s end. It helps to conduct root cause analysis of the problems related to the performance of the application and help mitigate them. Real-user monitoring evaluates the performance of the application across devices, operating systems, browsers, and networks. It also involves measuring voice capabilities and browser interactions.

Endpoint monitoring: It assesses the application’s performance using a piece of code running on the device. Suitable for monitoring remote applications, endpoint monitoring can help identify the impact of any app configuration changes on the users.

Synthetic transaction monitoring: It makes an estimation about the application’s user experience by testing the performance of all IT entities (services, components, and networks) that are involved in deploying the application. This can be a great choice to analyze the performance of SaaS applications and their impact on the user experience.

Network visibility: One of the major bottlenecks that business enterprises or their end customers often face is that of the network through which the traffic flows. Network visibility allows businesses to better understand the traffic behavior on their networks and work towards improving the performance, efficiency, and security of such networks. It is about having an awareness of the various components that are part of the network to get insight into the performance, analytics, and user traffic. Here, data pertaining to the performance of an application is collected, organized, distributed, and delivered to be used by the tools.

Conclusion

A strong DEM strategy helps to tie the digital initiatives of enterprises to their business outcomes. It enables businesses to be competitive and transformational in driving partnerships, growth, innovation, and setting a high-quality benchmark. By leveraging a robust customer experience assurance platform, businesses across domains can unlock new opportunities, innovate, streamline processes, mitigate risks, derive superior user experiences, and achieve growth.