10 good reasons to monitor the user experience

Application monitoring is essential nowadays, considering the importance of the user experience on applications of all kinds (enterprise, web, mobile, etc.). The purpose of digital experience monitoring or ‘DEM’, Gartner says, is to check/measure the availability of your services and provide you with performance indicators representing response time, interactive time, page stability, and more.

Published on 14.04.2022

Why monitor the user experience:

1 – To detect downtime before it affects your customers

If your application/website is slow or not responding, your users will not enjoy their experience. This means they probably won’t use your service again, or worse – they may share their bad experience with a large number of potential users. To avoid that, it is vital for your technical teams to be alerted when anything goes wrong, so they can fix it with all due speed.

2- To automate time-consuming tasks for your technical teams

Lots of the work that’s done every morning by your coworkers, involving manual tasks which may be meticulous and time-consuming, is aimed at ensuring the availability and operation of your applications (morning check). The repetitiveness of these tasks can result in human error, in addition to taking a great deal of effort. Automating them, therefore, can free up your teams for higher-value projects.

3- To substantiate the user experience with an objective ‘outside-to-inside’ vision

There is a wide variety of tools for monitoring, informing, and alerting you when problems arise on the infrastructure of your services. Still, it may happen that all lights are green as far as your technical equipment is concerned, where no problem is detected. Meanwhile, on the side where your users are situated, service may be slow, the interface not responding correctly, or other problems may occur. These can ruin your users’ experience.

4 – To reconcile your users with IT services

It follows from the preceding point that application or website users commonly exagerate the problems they encounter on your platform, explaining that ‘it never works’, for example, even when the problem was a temporary glitch that lasted for 5 minutes. With a user experience monitoring tool, you can transcribe the real experience of your users.

5 – To challenge your hosting company / IT providers to improve services in line with your SLAs/XLAs

Many businesses have trouble loading internet pages, large images, data, and other latency grievances. An application monitoring tool makes it easy to forward results to your hosting company and thereby demonstrate and quantify the problems and delays that you encounter… plus it helps providers to understand their customers’ issues and work with them to fix problems. In establishing SLAs (Service Level Agreements) you specify the services to monitor, set the conditions for monitoring, define the appropriate metrics, and set clear targets for the expected level of service. Similarly, XLAs (eXperience Level Agreements) can be drafted to monitor the actual user experience of your customers/coworkers. Tracking SLA/XLA metrics enables you to factualize the user experience in an agreement between internal IT teams and business units, as well as between enterprises and their IT service providers, not to mention between consumers and providers of consumer services.

6 – For an objective view from an impartial, independent third party

And, it follows from the preceding point, that it is important to rely on measurements that are impartial and independent. Ekara by ip-label provides you with unbiased feedback and an objective view of your results without taking sides.

7 – To prioritize problem-solving and investment

Your monitoring tool makes it easier for you to prioritize actions in line with their importance and cost. It may be that some of your indicators do not differentiate between what can be dealt with later (little user-side impact) and what it is urgent to remediate. As user experience is a sensitive issue, it makes sense to point your maintenance teams toward problems that degrade the user experience.

8 – To support and sustain your coworkers’ productivity

A variety of tools are needed to ensure that your business is running well. When your digital tools don’t work, your workforce becomes passive because they can’t do their work efficiently. An internal monitoring tool issues alerts to technical teams when incidents arise, making it possible to take action quickly. This helps keep maintenance and unforeseen downtime to a minimum, so that employees can make the most of their workday.

9 – To identify improvement points for a competitive edge

The results collected by your monitoring tool can be compared to those of your competitors in a benchmark. Why do your competitors get more visitors than you do? Why are they more productive? Is the experience they deliver to their customers/employees more satisfying than the one you provide?

These are essential questions to ask when you want your performance to shine in a competitive marketplace.

To boost your productivity and income

If you have a high-performing, consistently available website, it reflects very well on your brand image. As mentioned above, you thereby prevent troublesome losses of employee productivity on business software or losses in revenues on e-commerce websites. You know that each extra second of loading time on your site or application means a 7% decrease in turnover and a 16% plunge in customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

Monitoring the user experience from the end-user’s point of view helps you to ensure good performance and availability of your website or application. This user-side monitoring goes hand in hand with infrastructure monitoring. It provides you with objective insights into user complaints and experiences, boosts your proactiveness in resolving incidents, provides you with business KPIs, and helps to improve communication between business teams and IT people.

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