The customer experience as an e-commerce driver With user experience at the customer’s disposal
07.12.2021A guest article by Tobias Fischer *
In online retail, not only discount battles such as on Black Friday increase customer satisfaction, but also the user experience. Full-stack observability helps to improve the customer experience and increase customer loyalty.
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Not only the pricing, but also the user experience is important for the online business to go through the roof.
(Photo by Megan_Rexazin)
The last twenty months have been a great challenge for many retailers in particular; some have been able to adapt to the new conditions better and faster than others. However, this year’s Christmas season is an opportunity for everyone to either benefit even more from their transformation or to make up for some of their damage.
Customers are more critical – but also more loyal
Regardless of how they have fared themselves, retailers must now recognize that consumer attitudes have changed. Especially during the repeated lockdowns, many people had no choice but to switch to digital services for everyday activities and errands.
Only companies that offer a good digital experience when shopping online, despite the high load on their IT systems, can retain customers in the long term. They have had excellent experiences with the offers of some companies – and today they use them as a benchmark for all other online interactions with brands.
Attention Index 2021: Who takes the rap for the app? according to AppDynamics, three-fifths of respondents say that their expectations of digital services have fundamentally changed and they will no longer tolerate poor performance. 57 Percent of customers only want to give brands a single chance to impress them with their offer.
Conversely, if the service does not work, the study participants turn to an alternative provider without hesitation. Retailers need to be aware of this: their years of efforts to retain customers can completely lose their importance within a few seconds.
But the study also showed that online shoppers are grateful to the brands that have invested in improving their digital experiences during the pandemic. After all, many of these applications served them as anchors to normality. Accordingly, two thirds of the respondents feel more loyal to those companies that have invested massively in the quality of their digital services.
Given the problems in global supply chains and the threat of delays in the delivery of certain goods this holiday season, companies should at least offer their customers flawless shopping experiences in order to continue to build trusting and lasting relationships with them.
Today, IT performance determines customer loyalty
However, in order to seize this opportunity, retailers must ensure that their applications and IT systems are able to withstand the high demand with sometimes massive fluctuations during the Christmas season. You simply cannot risk performance problems or even failures.
The recent disruption at Meta (formerly Facebook) should also be a clear reminder to technologists of the importance of flawless digital experiences. However, to ensure this, retail technologists need new tools and approaches instead of traditional log and service monitoring solutions, which are widely used in the industry.
Traditional monitoring solutions are hardly suitable for managing and optimizing an increasingly complex IT environment and discovering and resolving performance problems before they affect customers. A survey conducted by AppDynamics after the failure of meta-services among IT decision-makers worldwide showed that only a quarter of them (27 percent) are convinced that their current monitoring tools are suitable for managing IT performance and delivering flawless digital experiences.
Instead, retail technologists need a unified view of IT performance and transparency across the entire IT environment – full-stack observability. Such a solution allows you to identify and solve the real causes of problems much faster. At the same time, IT experts must link IT performance data with real-time business data in order to be able to prioritize disruptions based on their impact and possible damage to the customer experience.
Tobias Fischer
For retailers, the stakes are higher than ever this Christmas season. They are not only fighting for customers, but above all for their long-term loyalty. If you want to win this, you have to create flawless digital experiences – regardless of how strong the rush is right now.
* Tobias Fischer works as a Senior Sales Engineer at AppDynamics. He supports major customers in the evaluation and implementation of the AppDynamics platform. Tobias Fischer focuses on user experience, security and everything related to Cloud Native. Prior to this, he was employed by various large companies in the field of big data, IoT and performance management.
