3 steps to improve digital customer experience

Every time customers interact with a company’s applications and services they expect great experiences. Digital services should be available, fast, and easy to use. But not every company has the right observability practices in place to measure and improve digital customer experience in a meaningful way.

Here are three quick steps to use observability practices to better customer experience.  

1. Measure the right things 

Make sure you’re measuring the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to understand your customers’ experience. Consider measuring and tracking the following indicators of service performance:    

• Availability 
• Largest contentful paint (LCP)
• First input delay (FID)
• Cumulative layout shift (CLS)
• Time to first byte (TTFB)
• AJAX response times 
• HTTP error rate
• JavaScript error rate 

This set of KPIs forms your quality foundation for customer experience observability. These metrics will show where you need to optimize your site for satisfaction, retention, and conversion rates. 

Get started: Use our quickstart bundle Instant Observability Customer Experience Quality Foundation to begin capturing current performance. New Relic sets thresholds—one for a warning state and one for a critical state—automatically based on industry best practices such as Google Core Web Vitals.

2. Segment the data 

Once you have the right KPIs to measure customer experience, organize the data to make metrics understandable and actionable. Do this by breaking the data into different segments based on your business. Ways to segment customer experience data include location, device type, product, line of business, environment, and teams.     

Get started: Read our guidance on how to segment your data to help you better understand customer experience and identify areas for improvement.   

3. Start identifying where you need to optimize 

Start by thinking about the future state you want to achieve by improving customer retention, conversion, and satisfaction. For example, if you discover that most customers in Europe experience a two-second or longer first input delay, but users in other geographies experience four seconds, you’ll need to drill down into why this is happening.

Get started: Follow the instructions in the quality foundation guide for finding and resolving errors. Review your goals and thresholds for customer experience KPIs. Compare these to your current state—for example, JavaScript error rate should be less than 5% per page view. Want to improve performance? Check out our Improve your website’s performance tutorial to understand core web vitals, fix latency, reduce Javascript errors, and create benchmarks.