Three tips for creating outstanding digital customer experiences

If you look at businesses that have thrived during the pandemic, the likes of Dominos and Amazon, you will see that they have something in common; excellent customer experiences that are driven by agile and innovative internal business cultures.

It has never been easier than it is today for customers to shop around for alternative products and services - agility and business innovation are the backbone of customer experience. Now more than ever, business leaders need to ensure they are agile enough to deliver a frictionless journey to maintain a competitive edge on an even playing field. Possessing the correct tools, agility, and internal processes to spot and solve issues long before users do is critical as it creates an enhanced developer and customer experience; it can be the difference between businesses that thrive and those that fall behind.

There are a few top tips businesses can follow to ensure happier customers, fewer bugs, and faster page loads.

Agile developers are productive workers

Agile developer teams tend to be more creative and productive due to their ability to swiftly adapt to new environments. Key to this is a user-centric approach, Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) helps teams focus on customer journeys and web performance as the primary signals for software health. Companies proven to have successfully transitioned during the pandemic are also adopters of approaches that focus on the user to engage with customers. Operating under a strong, cohesive unit helps to foster a team culture of customer success.

Customer-first businesses

Legacy "page load time" metrics insufficiently measure what matters most to customers. Modern websites are dynamic in comparison, they look to user-centric performance metrics to measure success that leverage effective benchmarking tools and improve overall page performance. Combined with technology that provides user-focused performance metrics and crash diagnostics, this approach will ensure that technology rollouts have the customer at their core. For example, Australian fintech Nimble went from not knowing when or why a customer abandoned their cart to effectively observing customer behaviour and conversions in real time. The developer teams can now proactively address potential challenges faced by customers and make informed decisions.

Answering market needs

To be better placed to meet the needs of the markets, businesses are migrating to the cloud and continually optimising the resulting user experience for their customer base. It is vital to plan the move to the cloud carefully and establish baselines beforehand so that issues can be tracked and traced. In turn, improvement and success can be demonstrated as soon as the migration is complete.

The top obstacle that DevOps teams face is an increasingly complex web of systems and infrastructure along with the intricate, distributed web of agents monitoring all components of the stack. Devs require a single source of truth to instantly observe what is going on in real-time so that they can immediately fix issues well before they escalate. The right tools and data assets are needed to enable swift action to be taken.

Businesses cannot afford to deliver poor customer experiences as downtime has a hard price to pay, Gartner has found that the average cost of downtime is approximately £4,100 per minute. That said, there are also additional fees that stack up including productivity falling, teams unable to carry out other tasks, as well as growing stress and fatigue taking a toll on employees.

The secret to maintaining seamless experiences for the business lies in the dev team - if they can access full observability across the entire stack, maintaining uptime, availability, and performance will come naturally. It is important that they are able to collect, correlate, and contextualise data easily - the key to success is a cross-functional team with a unified customer experience management strategy, a shared understanding of the user journey, and a full-stack view of softwares’ performance.