While defining strategies for cloud, mobile, social and big data, IT leaders must not drop the ball in retaining customers that are now experiencing your company’s current applications. Don’t let cumulative degradation chase off your customers.

IT shops globally deal continuously with rapid change, working to detail how to leverage key technologies promising business growth, cost management and customer insights - all of which must be considered. But who’s looking out for customers that are using your company’s currently deployed applications right now? These customers are deciding whether your company delivers a positive customer experience.

What should IT leaders do today to ensure now customers are still customers in six months or two years when the next generation of “even more awesome, fixes everything, super fast” applications are delivered? Keeping now customers makes smart financial and business sense.

Approaching IT application delivery holistically - end-to-end - widens IT perspective, presenting opportunities for IT to show value. The business no longer cares about who owns, runs or how infrastructure is managed, as business teams can easily reach into the cloud for services. The business needs IT to understand business operations, how the company’s applications – internal or SaaS - support business operations and then ensure application delivery meets customer expectations.

Keeping now customers should be a critical business KPI for the IT team; it’s already important to marketing, sales and operations. Poor application performance is not an option. Figure 1 demonstrates how a 97% delivery success rate for an application and underlying infrastructure components in a moderately complex process stream leads to an unacceptable customer experience. (97% is far below the capability delivered by most companies.)

FIGURE 1

Cumulative degradation is a mathematical reality haunting application delivery. IT teams historically strive to deliver against IT-centric metrics – uptime/availability, web page response time, query response time, etc. – when IT should be focused on metrics important to business leaders and for this discussion, application robustness from the customer’s perspective.

Investing in Delivery Success

Notice that investing to bring all components up to 99% (Figure 2) delivery success improves the customer experience more than investing to get the back-end components up to 99.999% (Figure 3).

FIGURE 2

FIGURE 3

Achieving 99.999% requires significant funding. Of course the goal is for all components to be 99.999% successful; however reality requires smart investments during the journey to five nines focused on business impact – improved customer experience – rather than meeting an old-fashioned IT metric.

Improvements when components are not company controlled – such as when the customer uses the company web site – adds to the challenge, as it is likely the customer’s ISP connection and computer are not providing 99% efficiency.

Customer experience needs to be a key focus of application delivery. “Standards” like the three second average web page response time needs to be viewed from a customer perspective, not a company perspective.

Let’s say that the customer’s ISP connection and computer contribute .75 seconds of latency to every response. Now, to meet the “standard” of three seconds, the company must accept, process and answer requests at an average of 2.25 seconds.

Focusing on customer experience focuses efforts away from IT measures. A recent real-life situation reminded everyone involved in the need for a business and customer perspective, rather than an IT metric perspective. Complaints of slowness were coming from internal application customers, so the multi-team troubleshooting began. Initially, IT was able to show that every piece of the transaction was performing acceptably (Figure 4).

FIGURE 4

Unfortunately, the serial execution was making the customer experience poor as the minimum response time averaged nine seconds. Presenting the data as above provided an “ah hah” moment for many. From that, the teams focused on reducing the delivery time. Simply parallelizing the individual the subcomponents provided an improved customer experience (Figure 5).

FIGURE 5

Additional improvement is planned, as this transaction still exceeds the three second “standard”; however, the example highlights how a change in perspective provides the catalyst to understanding where true business value can be achieved.

Taking Action to Improve Customer Experience

Take action to improve customer experience while allowing time for your company’s APM solution to mature. Many companies buy galactic APM solutions; then discover rollout is slow, time-consuming and expensive leading to disappointment.

Strategic investments and time will grow your APM capabilities; especially once initial improvements payoff in measurable improvements. Even starting with the ten slowest transactions or more granularly the ten slowest SQL statements or driving out the ten worst performing infrastructure issues will ignite excitement across the business. Infamous companies are known for high-performance teams due to a calculated purging process to rid the company of underperforming staff; using the same methodology to improve the 10 worst customer experience inhibitors will have the same impact: constantly improved customer experience.