Boosting Digital Performance with End-user Experience Testing
Tags: digitalperformance, appperformance, experiencetesting
Published: 2024-03-14 12:41:05

Traditional monitoring and observability tools do not provide a complete understanding of users' experiences as they focus on app performance from a technical standpoint rather than the end user's perspective. As businesses increasingly rely on digital experiences, it is crucial to recognize the significance of user actions and behaviors in achieving successful outcomes. Businesses require an approach that is oriented towards business transactions from the user's viewpoint rather than the intrinsic performance of the application code.

[Digital Customer Experience Monitoring](https://www.headspin.io/solutions/experience-monitoring) (DEM) is rapidly gaining recognition as the go-to solution for organizations that seek to enhance their users' digital experience. DEM offers a more comprehensive end-user experience perspective, enabling IT teams to evaluate digital experiences and customer actions in real-time. By providing data on business transactions and user behavior, DEM empowers organizations to optimize customer journeys and identify service performance problems, along with streamlining root cause determination and resolution. According to Gartner, the adoption of DEM is set to surge, with at least 60% of I&O leaders expected to leverage it to gauge application, services, and endpoint performance from the user's viewpoint by 2026.

## Why Should SREs Leverage Digital Experience Monitoring?
Real-time customer experience monitoring is essential to gain complete visibility into a customer's engagement via digital touchpoints. By tracking every click, tap, zoom, scroll, swipe, and page visit in real-time, businesses can identify and quickly react to any points of friction, which significantly improves the customer experience. Digital experience analytics tools offer context around digital customer interactions, going beyond identifying technical issues and reporting page views, unique visits, and conversion rates. These tools reveal not only what the customer did but also why they did it, allowing businesses to better understand customer preferences and behaviors at a granular level.

Digital experience monitoring provides organizations with actionable insights to inform decision-making and improve customer experience. Modern platforms enable automatic mapping of the customer journey without tagging, making continuous analysis simple. DEM solutions offer IT administrators a dashboard to view performance data and metrics to enhance experience management for web applications, APIs, and mobile apps. DEM tools enable proactive monitoring of performance and issue pinpointing, whether they arise from the local network, end-user devices, ISPs, or SaaS applications like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Box.

Some of the critical functions of DEM tools include:

- Actively and passively monitoring, benchmarking, and measuring the digital experiences of every end user in an organization.
- Monitoring SaaS and cloud-based and private applications using HTTP, ICMP, or UDP protocols run on end-user devices.
- Collecting real-time device health information, such as CPU percentage, memory usage, Network IO, Disk IO, Wi-Fi signal strength, etc., for end-user devices.
providing hop-by-hop network path visualization from the endpoint to the application.
- Offering remote troubleshooting capabilities to isolate and resolve end-user IT issues.

Let's explore some of the primary advantages that digital experience monitoring can offer to any business, regardless of its industry or size:

● **Better agility and collaboration **

Digital customer experience monitoring can enhance agility and collaboration by providing improved visibility to teams responsible for desktop, security, network, and helpdesk operations. With this visibility, these teams can deliver better experiences in line with digital transformation goals while also quickly addressing and resolving any user experience issues. 

● **Enhanced productivity**

Observing user behavior and their journey is crucial to ensuring their productivity. A well-planned DEM strategy, coupled with the right experience monitoring tools, can help organizations minimize downtime and outages, leading to a smoother and more efficient digital experience for users.

● **Lower complexity and cost**

Digital experience monitoring solutions provide IT professionals with a unified view of their organization's digital experiences, reducing the need for expensive and convoluted point monitoring solutions that can cause more harm than good.

● **Ease of operation**

The increased visibility provided by DEM solutions simplifies IT operations by allowing faster issue resolution, which frees up the ITOps team to focus on more productive tasks.

‍● **Higher customer satisfaction**

By deploying DEM solutions, organizations can not only monitor their network and end users but also ensure high-quality digital customer experiences. Gaining a deep understanding of how customers interact with their website can provide a competitive advantage to organizations.

## What Technologies Are Involved In DEM?
DEM has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, and its success is attributed to a combination of various technologies. The ultimate objective of integrating these technologies is to gain an external viewpoint into application issues, thereby comprehending the user experience in detail.

**1. Synthetic Monitoring**
One of the technologies that has contributed to the emergence of DEM in recent years is synthetic monitoring. This involves using scripts to replicate user behavior across different devices, network conditions, and locations to gather data on your product's performance. Typically, synthetic monitoring solutions use a robot app that mimics user behavior and provides insights into system availability and issues during development. Another term for this process is synthetic transaction monitoring (STM).

**2. Real-user Monitoring **
Real-user monitoring, or RUM or end-user experience monitoring (EUEM), is a valuable tool for collecting data from real users interacting with your app. Using a JavaScript snippet to collect real-time data on page load times, HTTP requests, response times, events, and app crashes, among other things, RUM solutions can help you identify and troubleshoot issues affecting the customer journey and experience. This makes it a highly effective way to improve the user experience for apps already in production. Additionally, when analyzing employee experiences, RUM solutions can monitor endpoints such as desktops, laptops, smartphones, servers, and other computing devices. 

**3. Session Recordings**
Session Recordings (sometimes called "session replay") are a powerful tool that captures and visualizes users' interactions with your app in production, providing an unparalleled view into their experience. With session recordings, you can see the user's device, operating system, and location, as well as all their other recorded sessions. A timeline of all the events the user triggered, such as clicks, page views, and text inputs, can be reviewed, along with information about network activity, JavaScript errors, console logs, warnings, and more. By capturing the user's experience with every interaction, session recordings provide insights that can help improve the customer journey and experience. Due to their usefulness, session recordings are now considered critical to any DEM strategy.

## What Makes Real-time Customer Experience Monitoring Challenging
The prevailing digital customer experience monitoring solutions in the market often take the form of isolated point products and typically exhibit several drawbacks, such as:

- Leaving blind spots caused by cloud security
- Forcing teams to manually correlate data from multiple-point solutions
- Optimizing reactively rather than proactively
- Requiring tedious maintenance due to having multiple agents
- Causing alert fatigue and not offering actionable insights
- Lacking cloud nativity and functionality
- Technology vendors have introduced "unified" DEM solutions specifically designed for the cloud to address these limitations. Despite these claims, many of these solutions end up being virtualized point products, which only serve to add complexity and cost.

## How QA Teams Should Select the Right DEM Tool
When developing a digital experience monitoring (DEM) strategy and assessing experience monitoring tools, it's crucial to consider the various types of DEM solutions available in the market. This includes:

- Determining whether the solution is cloud-based or appliance-based.
- Assessing the amount of additional instrumentation required for the solution.
- Evaluating the potential to consolidate existing tools for improved operational efficiency.
- Considering how the DEM tool will address new converged SD-WAN and SASE architectures as part of the user-to-application delivery chain.
- Estimating the timeline for the solution to deliver measurable results.
By addressing these, you can ensure that the solution you choose improves the end-user experience and streamlines the challenges that IT operations teams often encounter.

## How HeadSpin's Data Science Capabilities Enable Organizations to Seamlessly Monitor Customer Journeys and Deliver Perfect Digital Experiences
HeadSpin is a global omnichannel digital experience testing Platform that offers advanced capabilities to optimize application performance. It provides access to real devices across 90+ global locations, leverages data science-driven analytics to collect over 100+ performance experience KPIs, and offers AI-powered insights, real device testing, multi-channel testing, user experience testing, performance optimization, and DevOps integration. HeadSpin goes beyond traditional pass/fail testing and assists enterprises in achieving higher test maturity levels by connecting business impact with user experience. It enables continuous testing across different environments, resulting in delivering perfect digital experiences, quicker triage, faster time-to-market, and cost efficiency.

HeadSpin's data science-driven capabilities can provide you with the following benefits:

1. **Digital Experience Monitoring**
HeadSpin's Platform enables organizations to improve their digital native apps' performance by proactively monitoring their functional and non-functional features. With various types of digital testing available, such as media, video, and end-user experience testing, organizations can gather valuable data to enhance their apps' user experience. The Platform helps teams compare insights and continuously improve app performance.

2. **Synthetic Monitoring **
The HeadSpin Platform's synthetic monitoring helps companies detect issues and bugs early, preventing them from becoming widespread. Additionally, the Platform automates user journeys for improved efficiency.

3. **Performance Monitoring**
The HeadSpin Platform empowers development teams to monitor and enhance the performance of their digital native apps by offering valuable insights and a continuous testing model. This approach allows teams to incorporate feedback from testing teams and improve the app's overall performance, accelerating its delivery and helping organizations meet specific KPIs.

4. **End-to-end Testing**
HeadSpin's digital experience monitoring Platform provides organizations with the ability to conduct remote end-to-end testing on real devices in more than 90 global locations. This empowers companies to expand their digital presence and reach customers in new territories without relocating their teams. With this feature, organizations can gain valuable insights into their app's behavior in diverse environments, which enables them to optimize their apps for maximum performance and user satisfaction.

## Conclusion
In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, delivering exceptional customer experiences has become more critical. As organizations strive to stand out in a highly competitive market, the need for real-time customer experience monitoring has become paramount. With the rise of digital experience monitoring (DEM), IT leaders and practitioners must accept the reality that they no longer have complete control over the user experience, but they remain accountable for delivering a seamless digital experience. By leveraging real-time customer experience monitoring solutions, businesses can quickly identify and resolve issues that impact user experience, providing a significant value contribution. As McKinsey notes, 85% of companies with more mature customer analytics functions report achieving greater value from their efforts compared to 20% of those with limited use of analytics.

HeadSpin's AI-driven Platform offers cost-effective digital testing solutions using the latest technology, focusing on dynamic testing strategies for success. Benefits include scalable automation, cost reduction, cross-team collaboration, fast testing, and real-time customer experience monitoring.

Original source: https://www.headspin.io/blog/maximize-rois-with-digital-customer-experience-monitoring-tools-and-techniques