Does Your DEM Strategy Connect All The Dots?
DEM Demands are Changing Fast
Whether through a website, chatbot, social feed, mobile app, or other interactive technology, digital experiences are a primary way that today’s businesses engage with customers, employees, suppliers and partners. And when digital experiences drive a growing portion of your revenue, disruptions can bring your business to a halt.
It’s Cyber Monday and your company is running a flash sale on a popular product. The good news: Your ecommerce site sees a massive spike in traffic. The bad news: Sales aren’t rolling in as anticipated, and there’s a high number of abandoned shopping carts. Your IT team works frantically to understand what’s happening. They can see that site performance slowed significantly during the sale, but they can’t identify the root cause of the slowdown. Meanwhile, the business is losing millions in potential sales and customers are fuming on social media.
Digital experience monitoring (DEM) has become a must-have for organizations who need to understand how their digital engagement touch points are performing. Ideally, you want to not only catch where slowdowns and breakdowns are occurring, but also identify the source of issues before they harm your relationships with your users.
It’s harder than ever to understand what’s happening across your digital experience ecosystem, and it’s only getting more complex. A typical organization’s IT landscape is sprawling, multi-layered, and always evolving:
Large, diverse tech stacks (multi-cloud, software as a service [SaaS], open source, AI/large language model [LLM], etc.) create numerous potential points of failure, and teams must contend with the interoperability of multiple, complex technologies as well as demands to scale and keep growing.
Frequent software releases and updates are also common. Multiple (sometimes daily) updates constantly increase the risk of breaking links between systems.
Modern DevOps practices, along with the growing importance of cybersecurity, mean that building and deploying software requires detailed coordination from multiple, often distributed teams.
Newer, faster-evolving AI technologies need to be monitored to ensure they’re delivering reliable results.
You know you need to monitor, analyze, and optimize all data from every experience to ensure top performance, reliability, and security across every digital touch point. But if your DEM strategy is not comprehensive enough to keep up with the complexity of your technology, you’re leaving the business vulnerable.
per hour is the average lost revenue due to poor user experience. (Source: Gartner)
would leave an app mid-engagement if they experienced buffering for longer than 10 seconds. (Source: 2023 State of Ecommerce in India report report)
of support tickets are due to unresolved user experience issues. (Source: 2022 New Relic Observability Forecast report)
Traditional DEM Solutions Aren’t Enough
Many organizations have already deployed one or several traditional DEM solutions to monitor different aspects of digital experience—one for ecommerce transactions and another for the performance of mobile apps, for example. In the beginning, many of these point solutions simply provided standard analytics. Others provide a specific capability like session replay, real user monitoring (RUM), or error tracking.
But when your DEM strategy addresses individual channels or capabilities in isolation, you’ll only be able to capture a fragmented view of the end-to-end digital experience. This piecemeal approach is no longer enough. Digital disruptions are often multifaceted and your users frequently move between channels and different digital applications, whether a web form, mobile app, or AI-enabled chatbot.
Additionally, many traditional DEM solutions take a reactive, rear-view mirror approach to monitoring: a problem occurs, your team is alerted, then they investigate what caused it and work to repair the damage. What you want is to proactively identify a potential problem and get in front of it before it negatively impacts the user experience. Waiting for issues to surface only raises your company’s risk profile at exactly the wrong times—a site slowdown during a flash sale on one of the biggest online shopping days of the year being a prime example.
To stay competitive, you need an integrated approach that’s:
- Broad enough to give you the full picture of the user experience across multiple digital channels.
- Deep enough to drill down into your underlying tech stack to identify potential issues and get to the root causes—ideally before they lead to brand damage and revenue loss.
Drive ROI with AI-Powered DEM
So, how do you connect all the dots and get greater control of your digital experience ecosystem? A modern DEM solution must be able to do all three of the following:
1. Monitor the entire stack: Track the drivers of digital experience across all aspects of your infrastructure.
2. Capture comprehensive data: Capture all the necessary data to provide a comprehensive understanding of what’s happening and why.
3. Leverage AI for fast issue resolution: Strategically engage AI to help you zero in on how to fix issues fast.
This is much more than traditional DEM. This is session replay plus RUM plus error tracking, mobile monitoring, observability, AI monitoring and more, all rolled into a single, comprehensive approach. The objective is to get an end-to-end view of, and insights into, the user experience, fed by inputs from your entire application stack. Here’s what a fully integrated DEM solution can do:
- Access the data you need to get a complete picture of the digital user experience. A comprehensive DEM solution should be able to capture and analyze relevant metrics such as logs, telemetry data, and more—no matter where these sources of data originate in your tech stack. Without that access, you’re flying blind.
- Detect and isolate root causes of issues like an application being down or a page that’s taking too long to load. It’s absolutely critical that you’re able to do more than just identify where there’s a breakdown in the user experience; you need to be able to understand why the breakdown is happening.
- Respond to issues proactively, preventing a degraded user experience. Your solution should also empower your teams, including DevOps, security, and customer experience, to collaborate across functions to deliver great experiences, while prioritizing security and privacy.
- Optimize digital experience performance on a continual basis, ensuring that digital customer experiences remain efficient, intuitive, and seamless, even as new capabilities and features are added to your tech stack.
The Future of DEM is Intelligent
AI is opening up a whole new world for improving the digital experience, with the promise of predictive issue detection and automated resolution on the horizon. In the near future, AI-strengthened DEM may provide an exciting new capability that will make accessing, detecting, responding, and optimizing even more efficient and intelligent. AI plus DEM could provide every team with faster analysis, insights, and resolution, without requiring deep knowledge of the underlying complexities.
Now that we’ve explored the possibilities opened up by more comprehensive DEM, let’s go back to our opening Cyber Monday scenario. How might this situation unfold with a DEM solution that’s better matched to the complexities and scale of today’s digital landscape?
It's Cyber Monday and your company is running a flash sale with some lofty targets for pipeline, engagement, and revenue.
The good news: Your marketing strategy worked and your ecommerce site and mobile app both received massive spikes in traffic! The better news: Thanks to your fully integrated DEM, you were able to predict potential bottlenecks on the response times of your checkout service. You saw that the expected spikes in traffic could have halted transactions. And your solution recommended an increase in compute resources to prevent the problem from ever occurring.
Before the flash sale launched, your DevOps team enabled direct increases to available compute and autoscaling policies to automatically handle more traffic, should the need arise. They were also able to instrument these changes in your DEM to ensure real-time visibility during the service's most critical time.
The best news: Your customers have been delighted throughout the experience. Trending hashtags celebrate your company's products and the exclusive deals. And you exceeded all of the targets set for this sale along with your most critical goal: a premier digital experience for your customers.
Comprehensive DEM is Key
Imagine a world where digital experiences are always on, performing flawlessly and able to handle any business situation. That world is in reach with a more comprehensive DEM that’s able to capture and integrate critical data from across your tech stack, identify where and why issues are happening, and help you fix them before they impact the relationships you’ve worked so hard to build with your users.
Get on the path to improved efficiency, competitive advantage, and faster revenue growth by delivering consistently excellent digital experiences.
Check out these additional resources from New Relic to dive deeper on what to look for when shopping for a DEM solution, and explore the power of integrating AI into DEM.
AI-Powered DEM: Bring Greater Intelligence to Every Digital Experience