Digital world is expanding and majorly revolves around the end-user experience of digital services consumed by the end-users. The Digital experience monitoring / management
, DEM aims to understand how end users’ interaction with technology that affect the quality of their digital experience (DX). Further outlines the process of analyzing usage and performance data to isolate service performance problems and helps speed up proactive root cause determination, resolution and optimization of customer journeys across the identified digital services and sub systems thereof. It is fast developing emerging technology that enhances customer satisfaction and simplification of digital services focusing on the end user.
The DEM ecosystem goes well beyond the traditional APM or NPM tools and may include additional tools, technologies governed by the real time monitoring of performance and usage data spanning across all devices, networks, (Read, Connectivity)?applications, databases, security appliances and hosted infrastructure thereof.
As per Gartner.. “Digital experience monitoring (DEM) is a performance analysis discipline that supports the optimization of the operational experience and behaviour of a digital agent, human or machine, with the application and service portfolio of enterprises. These users, human or digital, can be a mix of external users outside the firewall and inside it. This discipline also seeks to observe and model the behaviour of users as a flow of interactions in the form of a customer journey.”
The Need & Objectives..
Monitoring digital experiences is critical for customer centric organizations to maintain their competitive edge and remain informed if their customers are having difficulty locating a product or accessing the digital service, assess and remediate users’ pain points as they navigate through their digital offerings.
Fundamentally, Data is collected from a variety of sources in traditional monitoring using various tools monitoring the device, network, infrastructure, applications, API gateways, databases making it a complex operation to discover the exact root cause of an issue. Unless there is a unified monitoring solution to make it easier to discover, prioritise, co-relate and ultimately resolve the most mission-critical performance issues resulting in a positive impact on the user satisfaction. Use of this diverse data collected in real time is leveraged in DEM implementation to help achieve the business benefits such as higher customer retention, productivity and increased ROI on the hind sight. For example, Real User Monitoring
?is a form of passive web monitoring and relies on services that constantly observe the system in the background, tracking availability, functionality, and responsiveness towards all user interactions. Whereas Synthetic Transaction Monitoring
is a performance monitoring practice that emulates the paths users might take when engaging with an application using a robotic process / client application installed on a browser, device, or computer that transmits a series of automated transactions on the digital service.
The DEM objectives or key KPIs are aligned to digital experience of a subject/user for the digital service consumed by them in real time, the KPIs are thus focused on keeping user in the core of DEM initiative …
- Availability: Is the given digital service available to the user? Talks about the managing outages and business continuity principles including system security and fault tolerance architecture etc thus effective manageability of agreed service level targets, SLTs.
- Performance: Is the interaction as seamless and fast as possible? Talks about proactively managing performance degradation, monitoring capacity vs utilization and optimum use of deployed resources etc even keeping eye on the network latency for remote users and remediation via CDNs, Edge caching etc.
- Error Handling: Is the service offered has any errors or broken components hindering the user from interacting or consistency / usability of the service? Talks about day two operations, patching, upgrades, device compatibility, code reviews, bug on releases and functional error handling to establish effective governance and control on all such risks that can mature and impact availability and/or performance degradation etc.
- Work flow: Can the user actually achieve what they want to do with simple and seamless operations within the services and modules thereof successfully. Talks about the application architecture, interoperability of functional modules, data indexes and caches, broken functionality,
- Usability: Are the needed features easy to find and the functionality easier to use? Can customer get sleek and intuitive experience? Goes hand in hand with workflow/user flow of transactions, data elements and UI/UX of application interfaces / front ends / web layouts etc keeping the eye foe details and enabling users for easier navigation etc. agility and simplicity of operating the deployed digital service
Technology Objectives..
The requirements landscape for DEM differ based on the usecases it serves or intend to serve, there are key reasons we must understand that drives successful DEM strategy and the execution thereof, these drivers are ..
- Monitoring vs. Intelligence.?Typically there is no correlation between the amount of monitoring data collected and improvements in key performance areas. Organizations seek to augment the value that these DEM solutions provide by generating unique viewpoints that benefit business users and decision making processes as a whole. Today, many data driven enterprises get grappled with analysis paralysis since types of data that is collected and the context in which it is presented and used further how actionable this data really is becomes the key differentiators in managing digital experience for end-users.
- Technology as a competitive advantage (TaCA).?Finding new revenue streams, engage with customers and create a competitive advantage are some of the key reasons for digital transformation. One of the key value propositions of DEM technologies is to assist organizations with the exact same goals by providing visibility into how digital services are being consumed, correlating technology deployments with business improvements and generating intelligence around potential business opportunities.
- Proactive and real-time approach.?The ability to identify performance issues before end-users do, get information on user experience in real-time and have tools and processes in place to take the right course of action immediately are some of the key reasons for increasing importance of DEM in a digital, customer-centric, data driven economy, this helps customer retention as well as customer satisfaction after EM adoption in true sense.
- Incident management and remediation.?One of the key “knocks” on the value of traditional or current monitoring tools is that they are effective in identifying problems from user perspective, but not very effective in resolving the issue and even corelating different data sets effectively. Interestingly, incident resolution is one of the core strengths of DEM solutions, as organizations reported significant improvements in areas such as MTTR and root cause analysis from deploying these types of technologies.
- New technologies and use cases.?One of the key technology management challenges organizations have around DEM are changes in varied technology environments that are being managed and inherited, the mix of legacy workloads and modern applications in the key technology management desires areas reported include APIs, mobile users, multi-cloud environments, 3rd party services and new architectures (microservices, etc.).
- New metrics and re-defined experience.?When organizations are looking to measure end-user experience beyond traditional IT-centric metrics such as availability and speed/response time etc. they are looking for DEM tools to also capture business specific metrics – such as application usage, user engagement, alignment with compliance requirements or revenue impact, the KPI driven outcomes.
Key Tenets of DEM landscape
Considerations for effective outcomes..
Since DEM is all about Digital transformation, they share the same dais for feature and functionalities of digital transformation agenda yet maintains the focus on customer or key stakeholder experience.. in DEM perspective there three key considerations for “must have outcomes” for and within the DEM ecosystem, they are..
- Comprehensive Data Collection for Customer experience –?The DEM tool should be capable of monitoring and analyzing all of the KPI / metrics meeting the business requirements. All of the customer information is stored in one place, with real-time updates to be able to share easily within your organization. It is important to be able to track the interactions with customers from their behaviour and record customer feedback, leading to reveal where it did well, and where it may have missed the mark. In addition, gives a macro-level view of the business, patterns and trends across a large number of customers for each digital offerings they subscribe to or consume online and help you effectively manage digital experience to streamline a customer’s journey in ways that existing technology simply was not able to provide, and in ways that customers did not expect.. A deeper understanding will enables to build more personalized experiences, and those personalized experiences will make the customers feel heard.
- Data-driven Action, analytics & Feedback –?Data is one thing, but what do with it is something else altogether. The DEM omni-channel platform could not only turn data into insights but also automate actions based on them, what would be the benefit? Successful organizations go beyond simply collecting and analyzing customer feedback and using it to drive action to engage customers directly from within the system, so that they do not have to leave the system and allows to generate customer feedback in all the right places, such as website, social media, in-house apps, third-party apps, and even at time in person. Gathering end-user feedback, including surveys, SMS campaigns, and interactive voice response machines and should connect to the centralized datastore to help understand how the customers engagements are going on and aids fine tuning the various aspects of technology and operations.
- Convenient Dashboard for self-service –?Customer feedback and CX data should be collated in dashboards within the DEM ecosystem, all key stakeholders should engage on the unified self-service dashboard to interact and get a single unified view of what’s going on, whether it’s the NPS score or a real-time view of customer feedback trends, key metrics and availability across all layers from devices, applications, infrastructure and connected channels to offer customized, role-based real-time dashboards. It’s important to customize which data is available to whom in different roles within and outside the organization so they know what matters most to them. The dashboard can also be used by leadership to gain a high-level view of organizational activity, make connections and discoveries about how different roles, functionalities ?and eco-system interact and generate balanced score cards.
In Summary, DEM should be a robust solution that provides visibility/robust reporting and alerting capabilities into both the back end and front end of an digital service and should utilize real user data and synthetic data to provide insight into user experience i.e. user’s journey from the user’s perspective. Having said that the telemetry of data in the current landscape of devices ( desktops, iPad, Mobile et all), channels (Web, Mobile, Social Media etc) multi-cloud platforms and various connectivity options ( like Wi-Fi, mobile hotspots, broadbands etc) adding to it the analytics of data and metadata etc, is non interoperable and complex in nature. These real world issues keep expanding the digital landscape of the DEM ecosystem and the robust yet simpler solutions becomes dream of digital enterprises and becomes a constant chase between available technology choices and limited functionalities of available COTS, tools and applications, a silver bullet is still in the gun, What say?
September 2022. Compilation from various publicly available internet sources, authors views are personal.
