As Kristopher Baxter from Netflix wrote in a recent post, “high performance is not an optional engineering goal – it's a requirement for creating great user-experiences.”
As a CMO, I could not agree more. In fact, I would even argue that for the business, application performance is only relevant if it correlates to meaningful user experiences and conversion metrics. The most common challenge hindering companies from realizing the full promise of application performance solutions has been the lack of a common language, and business-relevant metrics to measure monitor and set targets for customer experiences. The organizational divisions that separate development, IT operations and business teams have led to varied and disparate perspectives on end-user experience, how performance impacts business, and the level of investments needed to consistently excel.
After all, if development or IT teams can’t share a perspective on the end-user experience with marketing or eCommerce teams, how possibly can these groups effectively collaborate to create and execute a unified, cohesive plan to consistently improve what the business cares about?
Everyone understands that apps now drive business success, and that all parts of the organization share responsibility for ensuring that application performance is up to the challenge. But to really move beyond the traditional APM mindset, where performance is seen as a technical problem, marketing and business leaders across global industries are in need of new approach to monitoring. An approach that starts and end with the user experience.
Enter the Customer Experience Cockpit
It is one thing to gather data and intelligence about digital elements that affect end-users' experiences, whether those users are internal or external customers. But making it easy for everyone to view, trust, interpret, digest and put it to good use is quite another.
One approach that every digital organization should adopt is establishing a shared “Customer Experience Cockpit” where Digital business owners, development and IT operations can collaborate on a shared, real-time dashboard focused squarely on end-user experience. Think of it as a NOC focused on metrics the business cares about. What digital businesses have lacked for a long time is graphical, real-time view of their users' satisfaction — not just binary pass/fail metrics or page views. What is needed is an easy-to-consume, holistic view into individual end-to-end experience that offers easy detection and quick response to changing demands of their users.
Actionable intelligence on end-user experience, shared with business and technology leaders in a way that is meaningful to all has always been a key focus area for Dynatrace.
Here are the three keys of an effective customer experience cockpit:
1. A simple, real-time customer satisfaction metric or “index” that correlates million of performance measurements, and and each user individual context, like which phone they use or connection they are on, to estimate how each one perceives their experience.
2. Explorative analytics to quickly identify which patterns are problems. Is it users in a specific state or country? Is it a specific type of phone or browser causing the issue? Is it a specific landing page causing an issue?
3. Unified data, that contains the high level customer experience information, correlated with the associated deep technical data, so that any customer experience issue can be investigated, understood and resolved in minutes, not days or weeks.
The future success of digital performance management will be cemented in its ability to transform data into actionable insights in the most efficient, meaningful manner possible for all participants. By sharing this knowledge in a way that makes sense to every stakeholder in light of their varied missions, tomorrow’s leaders will have an unshakable advantage as they work to meet end-user expectations and their organizations competitiveness in the evolving digital economy.
Nicolas Robbe is CMO at Dynatrace.
