Nearly 80% of American consumers say speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service are the most important elements of a positive customer experience. And technology has become a key strategy for organizations to meet those customer expectations. From enabling efficient transactions and supporting employees on the back end to creating seamless user experiences on the front end, technology is crucial to elevating experiences and meeting organizational goals.
Unfortunately, that same technology can also become an organization’s biggest stumbling block.
While digital transformation, innovation and continuous improvement enabled unprecedented growth and scalability, they also created unprecedented complexity. With highly-distributed cloud native networks, legacy software and disparate third-party applications, it’s simply become too much to monitor. In fact, two-thirds of technologists admit they lack the strategy and tools to effectively measure how technology decisions impact business outcomes.
Without clear insight and visibility into the full technology stack, organizations are operating with critical blind spots that put them at risk for not only fumbling key customer touchpoints — but also opportunities to innovate and fully leverage their investment.
The high impact of low visibility
Seventy-three percent of customers say experience is an important factor in their purchasing decisions, behind price and product quality — a strong indicator that companies leveraging technology for better customer experiences have a competitive advantage.
However, only 22% of companies have access to real-time metrics that impact customer experience — which means nearly 80% of companies are putting their customer loyalty at risk.
Lack of business full-stack observability puts companies in a reactive posture — creating friction for customers and employees. By the time an issue has been identified, the customer experience (and revenue) is already in jeopardy. And when one in three consumers (32%) say they will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience, organizations must pay attention to how their tech stacks up.
An end-to-end business challenge
Lack of visibility affects more than just IT. Take an outage, for example. Performance issues and outages can be caused by a number of factors, including network failures, usage spikes, software and hardware failures, and third-party outages. To prevent and mitigate the risk of downtime, IT needs to have full insight into its stack.
But with the increasingly complex application landscape of most enterprises, application performance is harder to monitor and therefore more difficult to manage — resulting in more preventable outages, longer downtime and angry customers.
And performance issues create a long chain of reactions across the organization, including:
Marketing, sales and brand reputation. In the wake of widespread digital transformation, companies must now compete on performance and customer experience. Today, 72% of consumers believe it is a brand’s responsibility to always ensure that a digital service or application works perfectly. So when performance suffers, the organization’s brand suffers too — making sales and marketing jobs harder.
Finance and accounting losses. A single hour of downtime that takes mission-critical server hardware and applications offline costs an average of over $300,000 due to lost business, productivity disruptions and remediation efforts. This includes the cost of time and resources for employees to discover, mitigate and repair the issue — as well as the costs of customer cart abandonment and even permanent severance of the business relationship.
Shipping and warehousing efficiency. Large outages impact both customers and the business when customers can’t place orders and inventory, packing and warehousing can’t process and ship products. In fact, unplanned downtime is one of the largest causes of lost productivity, delays, and unhappy customers — costing manufacturers an estimated $50 billion a year.
Organizational culture. Technology should enable employees to perform better while making their jobs easier and more efficient. When an outage or other performance issues arise, disrupting work — or even adding to workloads as IT teams try to fix the problem — employees are bound to feel frustrated. In other words, culture suffers if systems failure is frequent, and employees will lose trust in the company’s ability to deliver on customer expectations. This can lead to lower employee engagement, poor employer brand reputation, and increased turnover.
Cut through the noise and align insight with action
It’s not all bad news though. Technology has the potential to drive exceptional customer experiences with seamless end-to-end interactions. But to do this, organizations need a comprehensive view with a full business context.
As Linda Tong, vice president and general manager at AppDynamics puts it:
“Full-stack observability is the only way technologists can deal with the sprawling IT estate and increased complexity created by such rapid rates of innovation. But on its own, it’s just not enough. Technologists have recognized that without business context, they will quickly find themselves drowning in complexity and data noise.”
That’s where AppDynamics comes in.
AppDynamics enables companies to deliver better customer experiences with full-stack observability of distributed systems through a business lens. This enables organizations to:
- Align teams and break down silos with a common context.
- Exceed customer expectations by proactively addressing problems before they have a major impact.
- Correlate application performance and business outcomes to act on what matters most.
Aligning full-stack observability with business context is not just an IT imperative, it’s a key enabler of productivity and success across the entire organization. From sales and marketing to HR to finance and logistics, every function relies on seamless, uninterrupted technology performance. And only with full visibility into everything in your tech stack that impacts customer experiences can you truly optimize business performance.
Ready to see how AppDynamics delivers end-to-end visibility across your entire tech stack? Start your free trial today.
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