Digital Customer Experience - definition & overview

The digital customer experience encompasses every step in the customer journey when interacting with your brand online. From user-centric perceived performance metrics to credit card payments and user clicks, the digital user experience takes all of these interactions into account.

DevOps solutions help teams quickly identify issues that impact users.

Today’s customers are more discerning than ever. A delay, a bug, or a broken link can cause a customer to leave your site and not return. One poor digital experience can decrease customer loyalty or cause a customer to churn.

Nearly 60% of the buyer’s journey happens online, so businesses must invest in digital channels. Optimizing your company’s digital landscape can decrease customer churn by 15% and increase overall customer satisfaction. Studies have also shown that those who’ve had a great customer experience in the past spend 140% more compared to those who didn’t, so businesses must spend time and effort matching customer expectations.

Product and DevOps leaders grapple with balancing innovation and potential security risks. Long development cycles resulting in big releases are now a thing of the past. Instead, product and DevOps teams focus on delivering value to the customer through frequent, minor releases via an increasingly complex web of infrastructures, such as microservices, containers, and serverless functions in the cloud and on-premises environments.

While this shift is innovative, it may hinder the user experience. As businesses become more dependent on digital services, they must resolve issues quickly and design a seamless digital experience to maintain customer loyalty.

Manual tracking of where problems occur delays fixing issues and subsequently creates dissatisfied customers. Further, digital transformation and cloud migration create expanding attack surfaces that risk the security of your digital platforms.

Unified telemetry allows product owners and DevOps teams to directly connect application performance to user experience. Ideally, you should be able to track every customer interaction and trace it across the application and infrastructure layers. This helps teams quickly identify bottlenecks, detect application errors that impact engagement, conversion and acquisition, and understand how components impact user experience across geographies, devices and browser types.

By focusing on critical signals, such as content delivery network (CDN), application or infrastructure performance, teams can address the factors that matter most.

Ensuring the reliability and security of modern applications is critical to optimizing the digital customer experience and improving customer retention.

Observability and application performance monitoring (APM)

Application performance monitoring (APM) measures application and infrastructure performance to manage the reliability of modern apps. Observability complements APM by providing visibility into your data, including performance metrics, logs and events, and distributed transaction tracing. That way, you’ll know immediately when noteworthy changes in your production applications may impact the overall customer experience.

Real user monitoring (RUM) is key for understanding application performance. It helps teams understand how users interact with apps and whether their experience meets customer expectations. For example, various factors can influence customer satisfaction during website navigation, such as DNS resolution, SSL handshake, request and response times, content download speeds, and how the user interface renders in the browser.

When troubleshooting issues that impact digital customer experience, machine learning-powered and correlated telemetry can identify component irregularities and the root cause of application issues. By establishing an activity baseline and surfacing only high deviation events interest, these tools help teams focus on critical events.

Cloud security monitoring

To make it easy for teams to prioritize and investigate security insights within your infrastructure, you’ll want a data monitoring and analysis solution that generates actionable security awareness for your cloud and on-premises environments. Let’s break down each capability:

• Security monitoring: Identifies relevant insights across users, devices, IPs, networks, and databases based on the specific requirements for the monitored tools.
• Security analytics: Delves into detailed messages to uncover security insights or summarizes large data sets to accelerate threat detection. This capability provides a deeper understanding of ongoing threats and helps teams respond swiftly and effectively.

With Sumo Logic’s high-fidelity OpenTelemetry and real-time analytics, your team achieves visibility into the performance and security of modern applications, helping you maintain a seamless digital customer experience.

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