Delivering a quality experience to users of your digital services

Digital services have become essential and ubiquitous. Online banking, tax forms, purchases, remote work, school, travel… But instead of saving time and increasing flexibility, these online services turn out to be a waste of time for users. Slow or unavailable services make customers angry, weigh down on employee productivity, and tarnish brand image.
For their users – whether they’re customers, coworkers, or citizens – business as well as public services are trying to create experiences (UX for user experience, which comes in assorted flavors like customer experience, employee experience, citizen experience, and so on) that satisfy demanding users.

The thing is that the providers of online services don’t automatically know how a digital service behaves once it’s in the hands of end users. Do your applications, websites, and other tools live up to your users’ expectations? What is the user experience of your digital services?

Knowing about the user experience means taking the user’s standpoint to gain an outside (service user) to inside (service provider) vision. In other words, it means seeing through the eyes of your users.
This is what digital experience monitoring/management (DEM) does. Gartner provides a succinct definition of what DEM encompasses: it’s the experience of all online agents – humans as well as machines – as they interact with the enterprise’s applications and services.

As the diagram below shows, DEM is where NPMD and APM meet, bringing together:

• the technical side with its network components (NPMD for network performance monitoring and diagnostics), which facilitates resolution of outages and degraded service and identifies optimization opportunities through diagnostic, analytic, and debugging features
• the application side facing end users (APM for application performance management/monitoring), measuring application availability and response times, with features for capturing user-side information and interactions

Good DEM tools provide an end-to-end image of application availability and performance from the user’s standpoint. They should be able to monitor real users, detect where they are located, and see how they interact with applications. Beyond the applications themselves, DEM solutions also have to analyze various networks, CDNs, web services servers, databases, in the cloud, on enterprise intranets, etc.

All of these factors come into play in measuring and analyzing the quality of experience delivered by digital services. Enterprises need these measures and analyses in order to continuously improve the user experience.
And to obtain these measures and analysis, Gartner forecasts that enterprises will spend at least 650 million euros on DEM tools in 2022. The trend is toward managing enterprise performance with an eye on digital experience or, to say it plainly, toward ensuring a good user experience with a view to securing revenue, enhancing customer loyalty, and supporting employee productivity.