Measuring Customer Experience in a Digital Environment

Measuring Customer Experience (CE) is a complicated matter. Managing it is complex. 

When a customer (or end user) interacts with a digital service such as purchasing a product from the company's website or a citizen is trying to interact with an agency - a series of transactions happen.

Here is an example from TradeMe's transactions when I am looking for a mobile phone.

I was served quite fast (less than 2secs)  and I am quite pleased as a customer with my interaction with TradeMe. If you observe the  particular transaction is actually made of many interactions and goes through a spate of technology stack. A basic technology stack may look like the figure below.

Now let's see how I feel when I interact with Hutt City Council when I want to do a property search.

Well the transaction is not made up of lot of interactions but the page loads up in more than 11 secs. Well that does not make me a happy boy and neither those who have a mobile device. It could be argued that many people do not want to interact with Hutt City compared to Trademe but then you are always better off having a pleasurable experience,so who knows why less people want to interact with a slow web application !

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”- Peter Drucker

Customer experience challenges in a digital environment are same as any other 'Brick & Mortar' business, one first need to measure it. In the Hutt City example, its quite obvious that all interactions are heavy JPEGs & PNGs. If these pics sizes could be reduced without compromising on the quality (and yes ,there are ways) there will be a significant improvement in the way Hutt City's property search works.

This is where organisation who want their customer to have a pleasurable or atleast satisfactory interaction with them in a digital environment need to build 'Application Performance Management'(APM) capability to improve their customer experience.

Gartner defines APM as one or more software or hardware components that facilitate monitoring to meet five functional dimensions:-

APM Fundamental Characteristics	What it means
End-user experience monitoring (EUM)	ability to monitor performance as visualised by clients or internal staff
Runtime application architecture discovery modelling and display	ability to identify various systems involved during a business transaction
User-defined transaction profiling	ability to simulate traffic load
Component deep-dive monitoring in application context	ability to find root cause of performance issues
Analytics	out of the box analytics to provide insight into current and historical performance trends

Below is a view of how an APM works under the hood.

APM is an old concept.However, the focus has been Data Center asset monitoring -i,e, monitoring servers , data bases, network,etc in their own isolation. However, customers don't just interact with     the network or the servers - they interact with the whole lot and thus stitching these interactions           together to get a holistic view can work towards measuring customer experience. It is complicated       but once its broken down (Analysis!) it can be improved.

Managing Customer Experience ? Well that is another kettle of fish. Talk more about it later.However, the first step is to measure performance of your application as seen by the customer to know if you have a problem.