If you did your holiday shopping online this year, you’re not alone. Cyber 5, the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, represented one-fifth of all eCommerce sales for November and December in 2021 (despite a slight decline in overall spending since last year). Americans shelled out $8.9 billion on Black Friday deals and $10.7 billion on Cyber Monday specials.

What’s the first thing most people do when they’re unhappy with a business? Take to social media to complain about it. Observing those comments – otherwise known as “user sentiment observability” – gives you a head’s up as to when problems become big enough to impact user experience. How can you monitor that voice of the customer? And why is it important to do so? Let’s take a deeper look at the issues.

End user experience monitoring is a mindset and a philosophy. It’s the acknowledgement that IT is not the outcome, but rather a means to an end. Think of it this way: IT is here to support business operations. It does so by delivering technology to the tech-dependent workforce so employees can do their jobs seamlessly. Therefore, the most important thing to monitor in the IT ecosystem has shifted. It’s not the network, the device, or the cloud – these are only delivery mechanisms.