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Enhance digital experience and business IT resilience with observability

Users were plagued by frustrating experience visiting a large online bookstore. The website was sluggish, images were slow to load and the search function was redundant due to how inaccurate it was. For a user, finding the desired book felt like navigating a maze, which led to customer frustration and churn.

However, the online bookstore underwent a website overhaul, focussed on improvements in IT infrastructure strategy and KPIs. The result was a lightening fast website with images that loaded instantly. The search function function became intuitive, able to understand typos and suggesting the correct title. Clear categories and personalized recommendations based on past purchases made browsing a breeze. The process was now streamlined and efficient, with real-time order updates providing clear timelines.

This example is a perfect launching pad to emphasize the power of a strong digital experience strategy. By prioritizing page load speed, search accuracy, and checkout efficiency, the e-commerce platform created a smooth and enjoyable digital experience. Users could now browse effortlessly, discover new titles, and complete purchases with ease, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

What is Digital Experience?

In a nutshell, DX is the sum of all of a particular user's interactions with a digital product or service. It includes everything from website usability and design, to search functionality checkout processes, and even post-purchase communication. A well-executed DX prioritizes the user's needs and leverages technology to create a seamless, efficient, and enjoyable journey.

Building on the example, we can see how a sound digital experience (DX) can be a strategic advantage. But designing a seamless DX goes beyond basic website checks. The sheer volume of user data requires a more sophisticated approach.

This is where Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) function comes in. Infrastructure and operations leaders put digital experience tool to use, to analyze and optimize user behavior, business transactions and the entire customer journey. It acts as a proactive extension of traditional application monitoring, allowing you to see exactly how your target audience experiences your applications. DEM enables you to benchmark your application's performance against industry strandards and identify gaps for improvement. With the emphasis on data-driven approach of DX, the ultimate result is a smooth and best possible experience for your users.

Glossary:

Digital experience: Digital experience refers to the multi-faceted personalized interaction that takes place between a business organization and its customer. The aim of digital experience management is to bridge the chasm between the organization and the customer. The better the digital experience, the better the user engagement, and the better the business growth.

IT resilience: The ability of an application to return back to its optimal working condition when encountered with a significant error. Modern applications are built to withstand such events and also auto recover from them.

DEM: Gartner® defines digital experience monitoring, or DEM, as “an availability and performance monitoring discipline that supports the optimization of the operational experience and behavior of a digital agent, human or machine, as it interacts with enterprise applications and services.”

Business IT resilience:The ability of a business organization to adapt to the direction of change without affecting its network operation is known as business IT resilience. The changes can range from issues of cybersecurity to cloud migration.

Why is digital experience so critical

Digital Experience (DX) holds a pivotal role within the broader spectrum of user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX). In today's digital age, many users' interactions with a brand or organization begin and conclude in the digital space. DX serves as a crucial touchpoint in the brand journey for nearly all users, regardless of whether they're engaging in B2B or B2C contexts. A subpar DX can lead to customers losing interest and potentially ending their relationship with the brand altogether. Moreover, dissatisfied customers have the potential to influence others, leading to further brand disengagement among their peers. Therefore, ensuring a seamless and engaging DX is essential for fostering positive customer relationships and sustaining brand loyalty.

Within the spectrum of modern businesses, some organizations have digital experience as front and centre of their business strategy. For the same reason, these businesses will need to master digital experience than other modern businesses.

Customer centric businesses: Industries like e-commerce, fintech, media & entertainment, and travel & hospitality are inherently customer centric. Here, providing a customer centric digital experience isn't a bonus but a necessity for survival as well as to stand out in a competitive landscape.

Digital-first businesses: Some businesses are fundamentally built around digital technologies. These digital-first enterprises, like social media or cloud-based software providers, rely entirely on digital channels to deliver their products or services. Needless to say, for such businesses, digital experience will be the very foundation of the business model. Any glitches, disruptions or outages can have far-reaching consequences including affecting user engagement, brand reputation and ultimately business valuation.

What organizations stand to gain by achieving excellent Digital Experience

Realtime insights: DEM provides real-time data on user experience across different platforms (website, mobile app, etc.). This enables identiffication and addressing of potential issues before they escalate and impact a large user base. The business benefits in the form of reduced customer support tickets, lower resolution costs, and improved brand reputation.

Data-driven decision making: With digital experience observability, organizations can pinpoint trends and user behavior patterns. This data informs decisions about website/app features, content optimization and personalization to improve user engagement. For a business, this brings in increased conversion rates, higher customer lifetime value and improved return on marketing investments.

Improved operational efficiency:

  • Reduced downtime: Identifying performance bottlenecks and potential issues before they escalate into outages, leading to reduced downtime and improved operational efficiency. This translates into minimized revenue loss due to outages, enhanced employee productivity, and potentially lower infrastructure maintenance costs.
  • Faster issue resolution: DEM enables organizations to pinpoint the root cause of user experience issues swiftly, facilitating faster issue resolution. This minimizes disruptions to user workflows and business operations, resulting in reduced customer churn, improved employee morale, and potentially lower support ticket resolution times.
  • Resource allocation: DEM helps organizations allocate resources effectively by identifying critical areas of their digital infrastructure that require attention. This leads to lower IT overhead costs and improved developer productivity, as efforts can be concentrated on areas that have the most significant impact on user experience.

Business Growth:

  • Improved customer retention: By leveraging DEM, organizations can effectively identify and address user pain points, resulting in heightened customer satisfaction and loyalty. This leads to reduced churn rates and a more sustainable customer base, accompanied by economic benefits such as lower customer acquisition costs and increased customer lifetime value.
  • Competitive advantage: DEM allows organizations to differentiate themselves by offering a seamless user experience, positioning them ahead of competitors. This enhances brand reputation, helping attract and retain top talent, fostering an environment of innovation and growth. A strong emphasis on DEM can bolster investor confidence, contributing to potentially higher investor confidence and support for the organization's initiatives.

Digital Experience and Observability

At the beginning, we talked of an online bookstore website's transformation as a great example of how focus on digital experience can be a game-changer. However, building a truly resilient DX requires attention beyond the user interface. The microservices architecture powering the website, while offering scalability and flexibility, introduces a new challenge: ensuring the health and performance of all these interconnected components.

Here's where observability steps up. It is a set of practices that empowers an organization's IT team to gain deep insights into the internal workings of their microservices architecture. Observability enables collecting and analyzing data on system performance, resource utilization, and application logs. This paves the way for proactively identifying and troubleshooting potential issues before they impact the user experience.

Think of observability as the early warning system for a resilient DX. It continuously monitors the health of the application, much like a doctor monitoring a patient's vitals. By catching potential problems early, digital experience observability allows organizations to take corrective action and prevent disruptions that could frustrate users. This proactive approach ensures a smooth and reliable DX, allowing businesses to deliver a consistently positive experience for their customers, regardless of what's happening behind the scenes.

Craft faultless DX strategy with OpManager Plus' observability-powered comprehensive application monitoring

Think of observability as the early warning system for a resilient DX. It continuously monitors the health of the application, much like a doctor monitoring a patient's vitals. By catching potential problems early, observability allows organizations to take corrective action and prevent disruptions that could frustrate users. This proactive approach ensures a smooth and reliable DX, allowing businesses to deliver a consistently positive experience for their customers, regardless of what's happening behind the scenes.

Proactive Insights with Synthetic Monitoring

OpManager Plus' synthetic monitoring simulates real user journeys, proactively identifying performance bottlenecks and potential issues before they impact actual users. This allows you to ensure consistent performance across different locations and devices, preventing frustration and lost sales.

  • Record and replay web transaction sequences using EUM agents, enabling visibility into website behavior, facilitating proactive monitoring of availability, response times and page loading times.
  • Observe from different geographical locations, enabling organizations to accurately assess end-user experience and detect issues faster.
  • Track actual response times dynamically with Real Browser Monitor (RBM), ensuring accuracy by accounting for real-time factors like user traffic and network lags.
  • Leverage web page analysis to identify components that slow down webpage loading, enabling optimization for improved performance.
  • Notify users of errors or missed values through customizable alerts, along with detailed reports and dashboards that provide insights into website health, availability, downtime and response time across all locations, empowering organizations to make informed decisions and enhance overall CX.

Analyze real-world user experience with Real User Monitoring (RUM)

Valuable insights provided by synthetic monitoring is further strengthened by capturing the full user experience. This is where Real User Monitoring (RUM) shines. RUM gathers real-time data on how actual users interact with your application, providing a holistic view of their experience. Track metrics like page load times, user interactions, and error rates, allowing you to identify areas for improvement and prioritize fixes based on real user behavior.

  • Real user experience monitoring, global website performance insights, transaction performance analysis, user sessions insights, platform-based performance tracking and script error statistics give organizations full observability into website performance and user satisfaction.
  • Track performance metrics such as response time, page load time, page views, throughput and apdex score to quickly identify and address abnormal values.
  • Observe real user experience across geographies, enabling visualization of website performance on a global scale and pinpoint areas of concern.
  • ML-powered intelligent alerts notify users of critical events, while customizable dashboards provide powerful visualizations tailored to specific team needs.
  • Real user monitoring can be setup in quick time, helping organizations to proactively optimize website performance and predict future growth trends with intelligent forecasting.

Get into the user's shoes with End-user monitoring

End-user monitoring revolutionizes user satisfaction by providing unparalleled insight into the client's perspective in enterprise internet services and hosted web services. It is essential for enterprises and application service providers to monitor applications from an end-user perspective.

  • Gain real-time visibility into every facet of the end-user journey, empowering proactive enhancement of user experiences.
  • Exceed user expectations by ensuring every click, transaction, and interaction is met with responsiveness and reliability.
  • End-user experience monitoring enables enterprises to monitor key metrics such as web site lookup times, file access on remote servers, mail server round trip time (RTT), network response time across branch offices, and more.
  • Comprehensive list of supported protocols and services including HTTP/HTTPS web applications, POP, SMTP, mail servers, FTP, Telnet/SSH, web servers, and more.
  • Perform end-user performance monitoring from branch offices, enabling IT administrators to track critical end-user transactions and ensure business-critical network services' performance meets user expectations.

OpManager Plus empowers you to deliver exceptional digital experiences (DX) through its comprehensive observability suite. It provides deep insights into cloud health, application performance, and user behavior, allowing you to build targeted strategies and proactively address issues. Real-time user monitoring, synthetic transaction simulation, and workflow automation further empower your DevOps teams to ensure a seamless and positive experience for your users.

FAQ on Digital Experience Observability

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