Digital customer experience - definition & overview

The digital customer experience encompasses every step in the digital user journey as it relates to a company's brand. From user-centric perceived performance metrics to credit card payments and user clicks, the digital user experience takes all of these interactions into account.

DevOps solutions help teams quickly identify issues that impact users.

Today’s customers are more discerning than ever. A delay, a bug, or a broken link can cause a customer to leave your site and not return. One poor digital experience can decrease customer loyalty, or worse, cause a customer to churn.

With about two-thirds of the buyer’s journey taking place in the digital realm, it’s imperative that businesses invest in their digital capabilities. Studies have also shown that customers value a seamless online experience and are willing to spend more if they are satisfied with their digital interactions.

For product and DevOps leaders, there is constant concern about how to balance innovation and risk. Long development cycles resulting in big releases are now a thing of the past. Instead, the focus is on delivering value to the customer continuously through small releases via an increasingly complex web of infrastructures, such as microservices, containers, and serverless functions in the cloud and on-premises environments.

This shift unlocks innovation, but it also creates challenges to the user experience. For instance, heterogeneous user traffic, such as NA-EAST users, Chrome users, and those running Safari on applications, makes it hard to tune in to the specific signal you need to manage a user’s digital experience. As businesses become more dependent on digital services they need to quickly resolve issues and design reliable and secure experiences.

Manual tracking of where problems occur delays fixing issues and subsequently creates dissatisfied customers. Further, digital transformation and cloud migration create expanding attack surfaces that put the security of your digital experience at risk.

Unified telemetry allows product owners and DevOps teams to tie application performance directly to user experience. Generally, you’ll want to be able to track every user interaction and trace it across the application and infrastructure layers. This will help to understand bottlenecks quickly; identify application errors that impact engagement, conversion and acquisition; and see how components impact user experience across geographies, devices and browser types. This allows teams to focus on the signals that matter: content delivery network (CDN), application or infrastructure performance.

Ensuring the reliability and security of modern applications is critical to optimizing the digital customer experience:

Observability and application performance monitoring (APM)

Application performance monitoring measures application and infrastructure performance to manage the reliability of modern apps. Observability provides visibility into your data, including performance metrics, logs and events, and distributed transaction tracing. That way, you’ll know immediately when noteworthy changes in your production applications can impact user experience.

Real user monitoring is important in understanding application performance. It helps observers understand how users interact with apps, and whether their experience is satisfactory. For example, many factors contribute to the overall level of user satisfaction when a user navigates through your website. There may be many different components that affect how the page renders inside the browser, such as DNS resolution, SSL handshake, request, response, downloading and the rendering of UI in the browser.

When troubleshooting issues that impact digital customer experience, anomaly detection that uses machine learning and correlated telemetry can identify component irregularities and the root cause of application issues by establishing an activity baseline and surfacing only high deviation events interest.

Cloud security monitoring

To make it easy for teams to prioritize and investigate security insights within your infrastructure, you’ll want a data monitoring and analysis solution that generates actionable security awareness for your cloud and on-premises environments. Let’s break down each capability:

Security monitoring identifies relevant insights across users, devices, IPs, networks and databases based on the desired requirements for the tools you want to monitor.

Security analytics dig into specific messages to identify security insights or summarize a broad data set to accelerate threat detection and gain insights into ongoing security threats.

Sumo Logic provides visibility into the performance and security of modern applications, powered by high-fidelity open telemetry and real-time analytics. Learn more about how Sumo Logic’s APM and cloud infrastructure security solutions ensure an optimal digital customer experience.