Many enterprises are taking a customer-centric approach to meet customer demands more efficiently and upscale their businesses. However, several siloed communication and workflows within these organisations often make it challenging to achieve the desired experiences for customers.

 Additionally, the initiatives adopted by the enterprises usually don't provide an extensive understanding of the end users' experiences. The market's answer to this problem is monitoring software. Enter digital experience monitoring.

What is Digital Experience Monitoring?

Digital experience monitoring (DEM) refers to a set of tools that allow organisations to capture, monitor, and as a result, enhance user experiences across multiple applications and platforms in the digital space. DEM software has become increasingly vital, especially as control over user experiences has been replaced by software abstraction layers like the cloud and SaaS components.

DEM services are becoming increasingly popular due to their ability to incorporate end-user experience monitoring with infrastructure monitoring. This enables enterprises to analyse revenue and other metrics against IT purchases, software deployment and service provisioning. Gartner predicts that DEM will grow to 20% by 2025.

That said, DEM is related to end-user monitoring but isn't limited to human users. DEM addresses the quality of both human and autonomous client-server connections.

How Does DEM Work

As more businesses move their infrastructure to the cloud, the demand for increased network bandwidth and end-user devices grows. Chief Information Officers (CIOs) must ensure their technologies work efficiently to provide customers with great experiences; otherwise, the customer will feel it’s slow, too hard, and error-prone. 

DEM solves this problem by setting up monitoring to identify where tech will fail to provide the desired user experiences. This entails building models that evaluate usages that have led to outages and slowdowns and then designing ways to solve the issues. DEM leverages various approaches for assessing performance from the user's point of view. Internally, it measures how changes enhance or worsen the employee experience and the business performance. Externally, it measures how performance may affect revenue generation, customer loyalty, and business reputation.

These monitoring capabilities allow CIOs to identify issues that may span hybrid multi-cloud IT deployments as they lose some control over parts of their IT infrastructure.

What Are DEM Capabilities

DEM has three core capabilities, namely:

• Real User Monitoring: This capability allows DEM to capture data about an application's performance without installing anything on the client's end. Real user monitoring helps with root cause analysis of performance application issues. It can also measure performance across channels such as chat applications, voice applications, browser interactions, and mobile devices.
• Synthetic Transaction Monitoring: This capability estimates the application experience by conducting ongoing tests on the performance of all networks and services involved in delivering an application and simulating the possible user experience. Synthetic transaction monitoring is an excellent choice for analysing the performance of SaaS applications and correlating it with the user experience.
• Endpoint Monitoring: DEM can assess the performance of an application by leveraging a small code that runs on the device. Endpoint monitoring helps monitor remote applications, pinpointing the impact of app configuration changes, and keeping track of technology adoption and employee engagement. It can also identify issues that affect employees.

What Are the Benefits of DEM

DEM solutions are excellent tools for enabling smooth communication and updating and optimising digital platform content. These solutions provide other benefits for organisations, including:

1. End-User Experience Monitoring

Customers and end-users usually don't have access to information about an organisation's backend issues. As such, they expect to get the best experience when interacting with various components of the user experience. By continuously monitoring digital experiences across multiple channels in different locations, DEM solutions can improve the overall performance and customer experience.

2. Enhanced IT Visibility

DEM solutions help to generate metrics that offer insights into the employee experience. This understanding can help identify ways to improve productivity by enhancing digital infrastructure. VDI planning, software rationalisation, automated fixes, and need-based procurement can all be executed to improve productivity.

3. Generation of Vital Data

With DEM, extensive metrics can be generated that help calculate app, device, and end-to-end network KPIs. This includes clearly defined user-journey interactions and custom-tailored applications. Analytics and insights generated by DEM solutions can help translate to business success.

4. Improved Employee Productivity

Employees who encounter fewer technical issues feel happier and perform much better. When problems are identified and addressed before they aggravate, employers have better digital experiences. In short, satisfied employers are more productive and can help businesses become more successful.

Why CIOs Should Consider DEM

Operating an enterprise can be difficult. Various business processes must work cohesively to provide customers with a satisfactory experience. Delivering an outstanding customer experience demands that all processes function as they should. However, the more processes and services, the higher the risk of fragmented backend IT operations. This is because they are unlikely to be effectively monitored by a single team. Moreover, users might experience inconsistencies in services because the enterprise is unaware, which leads to poor customer experiences.

DEM solutions can help CIOs analyse the performance of these IT and business processes, identify issues as soon as possible—it improves observability—and help solve them to provide satisfactory end-user experiences.

CIOs considering leveraging DEM need to weigh the benefits of a consistent DEM solution and a better capability for customisation. An organisation-wide digital experience monitoring program may benefit from a common approach across a company's IT strategy. Suppose a company decides to leverage the program on a case-by-case basis; they may experience significant rework as IT teams customise metrics and log each new business case or application.

According to Gartner, adopting a DEM solution can provide consistency for end-user experiences across internal and external initiatives. With it, organisations can deliver reliable, responsive, and enjoyable experiences.

Wrapping Up

In today's hyper-connected world, delivering satisfactory end-user experiences is essential. DEM helps you capture, monitor, and improve user experiences across digital platforms. These tools have simplified how organisations monitor interactions between service websites and target audiences. Get in touch with us today to learn more about digital experience monitoring and request a free trial of our solution.