The current COVID-19 pandemic is continuing to create new challenges for technologists. Businesses are under phenomenal pressure to keep applications and digital services up and running, while at the same time being asked to deliver the best experience possible for their end users.

In normal circumstances, consumers have very high expectations for the level of service they receive when interacting with a brand. This demand for flawless digital experiences has meant that organizations need to deliver high-performance and scalable services at all times to protect their reputation and stay ahead of the competition.

However, during the current pandemic, consumers’ demands have intensified, as they rely even more on digital services to access information, services and products. It’s no surprise then that 61 per cent of technologists surveyed in the Agents of Transformation 2020 Report feel more under pressure at work than ever before.

In a digital-first world, brands need to ensure their digital performance is, and continues to be, a top priority. For IT teams, end-to-end visibility into both web and mobile applications is vital for gaining the insight they need to understand the consumers’ habits, as well as the broader business.

Increasing complexity across the technology stack, however, has meant that delivering exceptional digital experiences as standard might prove challenging for organizations. So, how can businesses successfully deliver an outstanding customer experience in the current climate?

Consumer demands impact IT

In recent years, application environments have exploded in complexity. This has made it more difficult for IT teams to react quickly to application issues and resolve them ahead of time. Today, digital experiences are how consumers engage with the world and, in many cases, how customers engage with brands.

Businesses need to pay attention as consumers have a zero-tolerance policy for anything other than an easy, fast and exceptional digital experience. According to an AppDynamics report, the App Attention Index, half of all consumers would pay more for products and services that deliver a better digital experience. Furthermore, in the event of performance issues, consumers will take decisive action such as turning to the competition (49 per cent) and actively discouraging others from using a service or brand (63 per cent) without notifying the brand and giving them a chance to make improvements.

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In response to the pandemic this dependence on digital experiences and applications has expanded. Many critical functions of our everyday lives – from shopping to banking, and working to education – have moved online. As outstanding digital experiences become the norm and appetite for services is soaring, brands need to ensure they deliver personalized, intuitive customer experiences.

To remain ahead of the competition, businesses need to differentiate themselves through the applications and experiences they provide.

Pandemic puts digital customer experience in the spotlight

As organizations react to the new business conditions which the pandemic has caused, 88 per cent of technologists surveyed in the Agents of Transformation 2020 Report state that the digital customer experience is now the priority for their organization. But 80 percent feel held back from delivering the optimal customer experience because of a lack of visibility and insight into the performance of their technology stack.

Some of the biggest challenges in delivering seamless customer experiences during the pandemic include: managing spikes in website traffic (81 per cent), lack of unified visibility and insight into performance of the technology stack and its impact on customers (80 per cent), and managing mean time to resolution (MTTR) with a remote IT department (70 per cent).

More than ever, applications are crucial to business performance, and technologists must find ways to ensure they have access to the tools and accurate data they need to make informed, strategic decisions in real-time, and connect application and digital performance to key business outcomes – application performance monitoring (APM) has become absolutely critical.

Simple steps to achieving exceptional digital experiences

Many businesses are already investing heavily in digital innovation to drive customer loyalty and revenue, but failure to monitor the performance of those applications and digital services puts brands at significant risk of unhappy customers, or even losing those customers to a competitor.

However, there are steps that brands can take to address these challenges and begin to achieve incredible digital customer experiences. Firstly, manage your application performance by implementing a robust APM solution. This enables you to monitor digital performance, safeguarding those mission-critical applications and user experience.

Secondly, align digital performance to your business outcomes. By analyzing your application performance in correlation with business performance you can ensure that digital services are always aligned to business objectives, such as customer experience and revenue.

Finally, consider how you can use insights to take action. For example using an AIOps approach, turning the monitoring of data into meaningful insights quickly or automatically using machine learning and AI, allows you to deliver exemplary digital experiences, by real-time monitoring the full technology stack, from the customer’s device to the back-end application to the underlying network.

To achieve success and deliver outstanding digital services through these uncertain times, businesses need to have full-stack visibility across their IT infrastructure. This will enable ITOps teams to consistently and quickly improve the digital experiences for the end customer. IT has become a strategic driver of business outcomes and a proactive approach to performance monitoring has never been more important.

To learn more about how AppDynamics is helping enterprises achieve incredible digital customer experiences visit www.appdynamics.com or read why Gartner has named AppDynamics as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the 8th time.