How digital experience management solves the observability customer experience gap

Executives have transformed their businesses using digital services, and growth demands that these services are high performing and deliver great customer experiences. To accomplish these objectives, CIOs, site reliability engineers (SREs), and engineering and operations executives are turning to digital experience management (DEM) technology that provides insights into the user experience, reduces customer churn, and maximizes conversions through customer insights. The need for technology and leadership teams to deeply understand the customer journey and engagement experience has never been more important for business success. Customers don’t have the patience for poorly performing services, and competition is fierce.

DEM empowers executives to deliver consistent, personalized digital experiences across all digital services, reducing customer friction and improving satisfaction by identifying (and preventing) performance problems that disrupt revenue-generating transactions, increase churn, and inhibit operational efficiency. DEM compliments existing metrics, logs, and traces that organizations collect to understand service reliability. It focusses on the “last mile” of a digital service, where customers (and employees) engage with a digital service globally on their laptop or mobile phone or in their home office. Understanding the user experience—and collecting and analyzing its important telemetry—is  a must-have capability. The complexity of applications, infrastructure, network, and multiple clouds makes DEM data crucial in enabling end-to-end service visibility. In addition, DEM provides critical business data on how customers are truly experiencing their engagement with a company and where problems might be occurring in a browser, mobile device, or mobile application. Without this data, executives operate blindly relative to a complete and real picture of a digital customer experience.

DEM expands observability with customer visibility and impact

It’s no secret that most customers use mobile applications every day to purchase products or engage with their business partners. For example, the National Retail Federation expected US holiday total spending in November and December of 2024 to range between $979.5 billion and $989 billion, compared with $955.6 billion during the same time frame last year. Of this, online and other non-store sales, which are included in the total, were expected to increase by between 8% and 9% to a total of between $295.1 billion and $297.9 billion. This figure increased from $273.3 billion in 2023. As the last 20 years have shown, the level of digital transactions is going to continue to rise as more services are digital, new generations of consumers grow up with mobile devices, and more mobile applications are developed. 

Why invest in DEM? The business benefits of DEM enable team collaboration across the various stakeholders involved in preserving and maintaining high performing services. DEM telemetry accelerates the time-to-problem identification and resolution, providing critical insights into the customer experience. By empowering cross-functional teams, such as technology, ecommerce, and marketing teams, with data specific to page downloads and HTTP and related website performance telemetry, organizations can analyze the service lifecycle and optimize cost. DEM adds value to an existing observability platform, enabling a unified data lake and empowering teams with a single point of view on service performance. This delivers cost-optimized problem and incident management processes that reinforce a cultural foundation for a proactive and collaborative environment.

Customer-centric intelligence

DEM enables executives to have a deeper and broader contextual awareness of the customer experience, providing a complete customer journey picture for the digital "moments that matter" in revenue generation applications. As part of an observability platform, DEM capabilities deliver cost optimization and productivity outcomes across critical digital processes, services, teams, and individuals, perfectly complementing observability goals. Competing effectively and efficiently in the future requires leaders to invest in pragmatic DEM capabilities to advance value realization from observability platforms. DEM analytics and data can shape and elevate the conversation of customer intelligence specific to their digital experience for the C-suite and business stakeholders. Correlating and providing the data in dashboards and executive reports empowers a customer-centric culture and discussion while speeding up decision-making and moving from a reactive to a proactive set of capabilities. Traditional organizational and data boundaries between technology and business teams disappear when business results become measurable and transparent, enabling teams to focus on the customer journey. 

IDC suggests that technology executives create concrete DEM use cases as part of their observability investments, placing the customer (or employee) digital journey at the core, supported by key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics such as churn, conversion rate, mean time to resolution (MTTR), mean time to identification (MTTI), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer satisfaction. DEM capabilities complement and expand the business value from observability initiatives, facilitating short-term wins that fund longer-term business transformation. For leadership teams, now is the time to adopt DEM with an observability platform to deliver sustainable competitive advantages through optimized service reliability and outstanding customer experiences.