Three ways to meet always-on consumer demands
Because your customers can engage with your website from anywhere - at any time - it must always be reachable, otherwise your competitors will get the business.
Downtime can lead to revenue losses and negative brand reputation. This means you must have an effective digital experience monitoring solution (DEM) to ensure website reachability and reliable performance.
Why monitoring the digital experience matters
By monitoring you website from the customer’s viewpoint, you can gain a better understanding of their pain points and see if reachability is leading to efficiencies that drive revenues.
This trend is growing. According to Gartner: By 2027, DEM deployment will rise from 60% to 90% as enterprises will use synthetic and real user monitoring to enhance the user journey and better understand user interactions of SaaS applications and services.” Gartner
To ensure this always-on digital presence and deliver exceptional digital experiences to your customers, there are three non-negotiable best practices:
1. Combine global presence with local experience
Your website is the first point of contact between your organization and your customers. You want your website to be functional for all of them. Digital experience monitoring ensures your website is always available, reachable, and performing well - no matter the customer location.
- Website reachability - An extensive global network of hundreds of checkpoints is critical for identifying website problems locally - before they impact your customer’s online experience.
- Find and resolve performance issues quickly - Know where and when customers are having problems logging in, loading your pages or adding items to shopping carts, avoiding unhappy customers and abandoned carts. Baymard
- Comply with industry regulations – Many industries have regulations that require websites to be universally available and performing well. By monitoring your website's uptime and performance, you can prove you are meeting these requirements.
2. Understand the user experience from end to end
To truly understand your users, you need both active (synthetic) and passive (real user) monitoring, because each approach has its benefits and limitations.
The two combined counterbalance each other:
- Synthetic monitoring
Synthetic monitoring is an important component to improve the reliability of your website and gain a better understanding of the user experience. A proactive approach to testing, synthetic monitoring runs tests on a schedule—taking the heartbeat, so to speak, to ensure the customer is reachable.
Because synthetic monitoring is an active approach to testing a website or service, it is the first line of defense against outages and slowdowns.
This is in contrast to passive monitoring solutions like real user monitoring— that require user action to initiate the test, where often website problems can go unnoticed for quite some time.
- Real user monitoring
Although it is passive, RUM is critical for understanding the user experience. It collects data from actual users, providing a more accurate picture of how your website or application is performing in the real world. This data allows you to identify and troubleshoot performance issues like which pages are loading slowly.
Although RUM takes a passive approach to monitoring, its power lies behind tracking unique sessions, generating user experience metrics for every session. This represents real users from real geographical locations using real browsers, across a vast array of devices and global checkpoints.
One of the biggest benefits of RUM is the ability to understand how satisfied your customers are. It allows you to monitor to find outliers where user experience is poor and take action.
- Capture user journeys for better content offerings
Capturing user journeys helps you to improve the performance, usability, and overall quality of your application. It bridges the gap between technology outputs and business outcomes because of the insight gained into user behavior. If a step in your checkout process is taking too long, you can lose customers. By fixing this, you can improve the conversion rate for your website.
Digital experience monitoring tools provide you with detailed insights into how your website is being used, such as which pages are most popular, where visitors are dropping off, and what browsers and devices they are using.
- Monitor using the latest version of commercial browsers
It’s important to monitor your website on the same browser that your users have. With RUM you can find out what browsers your users are using. Google, for example, releases a full OS update of its Chrome browser every four weeks, and minor updates to the version every two or three weeks.
Running tests from the latest versions of commercial browsers means you can get a true sense of the customer experience, rather than an emulation. Updated browsers provide more accurate data regarding the user journey when it comes to monitoring.
3. Monitor and test API’s
There is no way around APIs and it is becoming increasingly critical to monitor them due to the complexity of modern IT systems. Everything is connected. IT systems interact with third parties via APIs, meaning they must be functioning optimally at all times. Monitoring them for availability, performance, and speed is essential for delivering exceptional digital experiences to customers.
DevOps
API performance can be unreliable, so it is important to monitor for parameters beyond basic performance. For example, APIs should be monitored for multi-step processes, feature changes, security, and for integrations with third-party and partner APIs. By proactively monitoring APIs, businesses can improve the digital experience of customers by ensuring consistent and reliable functionality - regardless of where the customer is located.
Conclusion
Gaining the attention of customers, new or repeat, is more competitive by the day. Businesses with a global presence must be able to deliver exceptional digital experiences wherever their customers are located.
Uptrends Digital Experience Monitoring is your first line of defense to ensure your websites are available, reachable, and performing optimally - for any user at any time.
Benefits of using ITRS Uptrends to drive digital excellence
- Reduce downtime and meet MTTR SLAs by monitoring and diagnosing issues across multiple websites and geographies 24/7/365.
- Meet customer expectations by ensuring website experience across applications and browsers, and by benchmarking site performance against industry peers.
- Lower the cost of support by increasing IT staff productivity through intelligent alerting and automation.
Protect your revenues, encourage innovation, and ensure customer satisfaction with Uptrends. Find out more about ITRS Uptrends DEM by booking a demo here.
