Winning the customer experience battleground, Game of Thrones style

There's a battle on the horizon and I'm not just referring to the armies amassing in Westeros.

Derek Stevens • July 13, 2016

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The new battleground that will determine which businesses win and lose in the application economy is customer experience. And if Game of Thrones has taught me anything, it’s that you best be prepared, winter is coming.

Here are three tips for providing an unbeatable digital experience:

Keep your loyal subjects happy…Optimize the customer journey

A poor app experience will frustrate your customers. Your customer can now engage with your brand through a huge number of digital channels, making it more difficult than ever to ensure they’re getting the best possible digital experience. In addition, your customers want to access your services where and when they need them, whether that’s on the web or a mobile or wearable device. You need to provide a seamless experience across all of your applications.

Understanding customer pain-points and where and when they’re dropping off in their journey will give you the visibility that can help you improve your apps and the overall customer experience. Analytics tools that provide deep insights into how, when and where users are interacting with your apps are immensely powerful in helping you understand where you can optimize and how best to keep your customers happy.

Know your kingdom…Bolster your infrastructure by improving digital performance & availability

Your customers want to accomplish the goal they set out to complete as fast as possible, whether that’s purchasing tickets online or depositing a check from their mobile device. You need to be able to provide fast transactions, as a slow performing app could result in your customers switching allegiances.

But knowing where the issue is occurring can be challenging. An analytics tool can help you quickly pinpoint if the problem is an issue with the infrastructure, code or design. It can also provide visibility from the user’s device all the way to the backend systems, so you can quickly repair issues as they occur.

Winter is coming…Plan, strategize and design with the customer in mind

Too often, companies put the cart before the horse and release applications that aren’t fine-tuned to their customers’ needs. Analytics provide visibility into how users are flowing through your app, what pages their visiting the most, how often their returning and what issues their encountering will give you the insight you need to provide a great experience for your customers. These insights will allow you to improve your apps for future releases so you can stay ahead of the competition.

Winning the battle

To win the battle, you need a solution that covers all of these areas and ensures that you’re delivering a 5-star application experience. With CA App Experience Analytics (formerly CA Mobile App Analytics), you can gain proactive, real-time insights into user behavior, buyer trends and omnichannel performance for complete visibility into digital performance and customer experience across web, mobile, and wearable devices.

Downloading the CA App Experience Analytics free trial takes five steps and less than five minutes to implement. Otherwise you can check out this test drive to explore a CA App Experience Analytics environment, complete with all the app performance, crash and usage analytics you’d gather from a real-world installation without downloading any software.

Want to learn more on using analytics to deliver flawless digital experience? Join the 2-part webinar and live demo series starting on July 14 at 1 p.m. ET featuring 451 Research and CA Technologies.

Guest Blogger: The ill-effects of past APM practice

The ill-effects of past APM practice

A smaller metrics haystack makes finding the application performance needles easier.

Guest Contributor • April 20, 2016

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In most application teams, the approach to application monitoring is to watch everything in production environment – all the time – to find customer applications issues that have slipped through the cracks.

This produces reams of deep-dive metrics that are then used for post-mortem analysis by developer experts and middleware mavens, in much the same way doctors study patients to prescribe medicines and assist in recovery.

However, time and time again this approach has been proven ineffective, because the Application Performance Management (APM) solution used is simply too metrics-oriented and descriptive – not prescriptive or offering much in the way of problem resolution.

Needle and haystack problem

By fixating on just how much descriptive data they can get from logs, app servers, browser engines, web servers and the like, it’s as if most APM solutions try to resolve app problems by adding more hay to the haystack where they are trying to find a needle. A more pragmatic APM solution would try and reduce the haystack of data, not increase it.

Similarly, in modern engineering, you don’t have to open the hood of an engine to find faulty or corrupted parts. Today, troubleshooting complex machinery is simplified via sensors and color-coded status indicators lights.

We could simply borrow this concept for application troubleshooting, but until now, critical end-user application support has suffered from approaches that solely address the wrong audience – the application developers.

It is high-time to alleviate the complexities in APM solutions by making them work like the intuitive sensors that exactly pinpoint offenses and eliminate guesswork. This calls for high-level dashboards with status indicators that provide an end-to-end view of the app ecosystem for quick diagnosis.

Application support utopia is analytics-oriented, not metrics-driven

Paradoxically, in contrast with the design justification of most APM toolsets, almost all organizations allocate less savvy support analysts to the problem-finding tasks.

These first-line support teams mostly tend to have rudimentary understanding of application technologies and programming languages used in creating cutting-edge user experience-based apps.

This causes the support teams to seek help from experts – the developers and middleware specialists – on many issues, unintentionally wasting their precious time in app maintenance and support, rather than developing that next cool feature that will ensure end-user loyalty.

Furthermore, the rate at which new programming languages and frameworks are releasing is faster than ever, and this puts a lot of pressure on developers to update their skills, let alone the support analyst.

Demystifying application management

APM toolsets must aim to demystify application management by providing simple and intuitive screens backed by strong filtering capabilities that allow flexible pivoting and easy root-cause analysis. Fundamentally, this demands a shift in making APM toolsets less metrics-drivenand more analytics-driven.

This can be achieved by redesigning APM solutions that were never purposed for support teams and involving direct feedback from support team members. It’s critical to making APM toolsets easier to use, and also to reinforce support functions and meet the expectations of customers that invest heavily in these technologies.

APM is no longer a tool just for the experts but a technology that requires simplification to help support teams make application monitoring easy, proactive and exciting. This is the only way to empower support analysts to handle a majority of issues themselves and to minimize the unnecessary involvement of busy developers.

Blog written by Nik M Jain, principal consultant for APM Presales at CA Technologies.

The Tyranny of Choice

As technology experts (i.e. sales people) we are focused on helping our clients' solve problems with our solutions or services.  What we really should be doing it making the decision easier for them.

Exceptional sales people transform themselves into advocates for their clients and build relationships based on trust and a history of success.  In 2016 from my experience, this type of sales person is flat out hard to find both for technology companies looking to hire them and for their clients.

Because of this and the explosion of content, more and more technology buyers (both consumer and enterprise) have turned to educating themselves before ever talking to a sales rep.  A lot of stats are thrown around about when clients choose to finally engage a sales rep  (usually 50%-60% through the process).

A couple years ago, I read an article, based on a book called, "The Tyranny of Choice."  The theory of the book is that consumers face so many choices, they become overwhelmed and decide not to purchase anything.  Around that time, I went with my dad to Best Buy to look at new TV's.  He had an old tube TV that weighed about 500 pounds and was thinking about an LED.  We walked into Best Buy and were amazed by the 200 foot wall full of TVs of all size and variety.  LED, LCD, Plasma, Megahertz, apps, networked, refresh rate were all things that he had to consider before making his purchase.  My dad ended up walking out more confused than ever.  He said to me, "maybe I will just stick with my old TV."  The choices and decision making process scared him so much, that he didn't buy anything.

I can tell you for a fact, that in 2016 enterprise IT, "The Tyranny of Choice" is still alive.   Enterprise IT organizations face a lot of choice for every purchase decision that they make.

To overcome, "The Tyranny of Choice", technology companies need to adjust their thinking and do the following things:

1.  Empathy - put yourself in your customer's shoes and really try to understand his world.  How many vendors call him every day?  What does his boss and the business demand of him?  and most importantly, how risky is investing in new technology to his career?  Truly empathize with your client's needs.

2.  KISS (keep it simple, stupid) - technology companies need to simplify their products, the evaluation process and most importantly the pricing and licensing process.  Remember, if we give our clients too many choices, we are at risk of confusing them.

The technology companies who change their thinking and simplify their offerings, will win in a world of choice.

Come back next week to hear about how industry leaders like CA Technologies are partnering with some of the largest media companies in the world to get the word about their products and services...and not how you'd think.

The Opening Post...The Application Economy

Have you heard of this phrase yet?  The Application Economy is everywhere.  It is an energy field created by all living things...it surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together....OK, maybe I am taking power of The Application Economy too far there...

I asked my 10 year old the other day if he could tell me what "The Application Economy" is...and he gave me a pretty good answer.  All 10 year olds know what an "app" is because their iPads are never more than an arms length away... and hey, they are actually teaching economics in the 4th grade now.  He told me that the application economy is how people make money by selling apps or things through the app....from the mouths of babes.

Now I am not going to waste my initial blog by telling you how Uber, Amazon or Yelp are good examples of The Application Economy.  Or how VRBO manages more than a million reservations with 1500 employees while Marriott does the same with 200,000 employees.  If you are reading my blog to learn that,  we all have problems.  No...instead, we all need to think about the future...of The Application Economy and how it will affect all of our personal lives and if you are working in the technology world, our careers.

One example of the future of The Application Economy is happening in Van Buren Township, MI...home of automotive supplier, Visteon.  While we all await the arrival of the autonomous car, Visteon is currently developing a platform that will allow a car owner to customize the dashboard in his or her car.   You will be able to custom create the layout and functions of your car dashboard including apps that you can interact with, just like your phone.  You will be able to download thousands of 3rd party apps, giving E-commerce a whole new world.  The future of the Application Economy will be in your car...

Make sure to visit my blog in the future where I will tell you more about how global technology companies like CA Technologies are helping companies get their apps to market faster with higher quality and speed and how the data center is more important than ever.

By the way, that 10 year old that I was telling you about earlier..is also coding on his iPad.  Watch out world...

Adam

Also, follow me on Twitter at:  @aprogolf