The Importance Of End-User Experience Monitoring

In 2020, there is no bigger driver of success than customer experience. While the business world glances into the financial horizon with worried eyes, finding ways to retain users, capture new leads, and create meaningful, long-lasting brands are more critical than ever. According to Forrester, the ROI of customer experience is 9,900%.

For most businesses, the value user experience is apparent — lower costs, improved loyalty, higher satisfaction, and a higher overall LTV. But actually finding ways to improve that experience can be elusive. How can your business capitalize on user experience? How can you improve how users navigate, consumer, and interact with your apps? And how can you really discover and understand the user pathway?

These are all great questions. And they all have the same answer — end-user experience monitoring. Here's how an alphabet soup of UX acronyms (e.g., EUEX, DEM, etc.) can completely change the way your business approaches user experience to help you maximize the value of every single customer interaction.

The Value of User Experience Monitoring

Here's a question: how do most organizations handle the user experience component of their apps?

In traditional software development lifecycle settings, user experience is an ad-hoc affair. Whether organizations use shift-left DevOps or standard waterfall methodologies, user experience is typically thought of at the start of projects during the planning phase and after issues arise.

But does that really make sense?

Should you be fixing user experience problems after they happen?

For years, UX has been synonymous with fixing issues. UX often gets lumped in with "customer service" or "technical support," but in an age where the customer experience literally defines your brand, waiting until issues happen is a surefire way to stall your overall growth.

Case in point:

• Around 40% of users will completely stop engaging with your app when loading times are too long.
• 90% of users have stopped using an application due to performance issues.
• 32% of customers will leave a brand that they absolutely adore after one bad experience.
• Only 1 out of every 26 customers actually complains about UX issues (the others simple churn without telling you).

In other words, user experience is the glue that keeps your customers stuck to your apps. It's a big deal. A really big deal. And, despite all of these statistics, the vast majority of companies still don't fully embrace UX.

32% of developers still learn about UX issues directly from users themselves. In other words, they don't know about a problem until their customers do. Here's the real kicker: 55% of companies don't do any user experience testing. Zip. Nada. None.

Excelling at user experience requires a forward-thinking approach and the right set of technology. You want to monitor your application performance before launch. And you want to run through every possible customer pathway before your loyal consumers ever have a chance to touch your amazing apps.

But how do you do that?

Sure! You could hire a bunch of UX testers. But could they possibly test every nook and cranny of your app?

Alternatively, you could use agentless scripts that mimic customer behavior to scout through your apps and alert you of any potential UX issues or app breakages. That's the goal of end-user experience monitoring.

Defining The Brady Bunch of User Experience Acronyms

The act of quantifying the subjective user experience has spawned a variety of acronyms. So, before we dive into the nitty-gritty, let's define a few of the key acronyms you'll see in this post.

• End-user experience monitoring allows organizations to understand the impact of applications from the users point-of-view.
• Application performance monitoring allows organizations to monitor the overall technical health of their apps.
• Digital experience monitoring combines both end-user experience monitoring and application performance monitoring to provide a more holistic monitoring solution. 
• Agentless synthetic monitoring involves using software robots to act like real users when monitoring applications.

Don't worry. We're going to break down exactly how all of these puzzle pieces fit together during this post. But, for now, it's important to understand that end-user experience monitoring and digital experience monitoring aren't synonymous. Yet, end-user experience monitoring is a core component of digital experience monitoring — which has more to do with structure than technology.

Understanding End-User Experience Monitoring

Unlike application performance monitoring (APM), which simply monitors the technical health of application components, end-user experience monitoring (EUEM) monitors applications from the end-users' point-of-view. This is typically either done via synthetic monitoring — where scripts are used to mimic user behaviors — or real-user experience monitoring — where real user sessions are used to learn about performance.

Of the two, synthetic monitoring is the only one you can shift left in your tech stack to preemptively test for UX. Using synthetic (or agentless) monitoring, developers can run scripts that mimic user behaviors at every point in the SDLC. So, every time the app is updated, you can test to see how user experience is impacted. Every time you add a new open source component, you can test to see how user experience is impacted.

The goal here is to figure out UX issues before launch.

Now, there's obviously the big lingering question here. What's the actual value of end-user experience monitoring? For stakeholders, quantifying the subjective nature of UX isn't just difficult, but it's the biggest barrier holding them back from investing in the right synthetic monitoring software.

So, let's quantify UX:

• 80% of customers are willing to pay more for a better user experience
• Good UX lifts conversion-based KPIs by 83%
• 67% of customers cite UX as their churn reason
• UX has overtaken both price and product as the key differentiator between brands

User experience isn't just a profit driver. It can completely transform your business. There's a reason that Bezos invested 100x more in UX than advertising during Amazon's early years — he understood the raw power of a good user experience.

But what if you could test user experience and performance at the same time? Welcome to the future of user experience monitoring.

Why Digital Experience Monitoring is the Future of Your Apps

Gartner defines digital experience monitoring as "a performance analysis discipline that supports the optimization of the operational experience and behavior of a digital agent, human or machine, with the application and service portfolio of enterprises."

That may sound like a lot to digest. So, let's break that down into simpler terms. Digital experience monitoring is about three things:

1. The ability to monitor UX issues and performance issues early and often.
2. Using the insights from these monitoring solutions to execute actionable changes.
3. Creating a culture that breeds heightened performance analysis via the technologies that support monitoring UX.

It's a way of completely optimizing user experience through the use of monitoring technology to breed more effective, impactful, and ultimately valuable applications.

To do this, organizations need to leverage user-experience monitoring solutions to optimize every facet of the user experience. From websites to apps to interfaces, discovering gaps in the user experience, and patching them before they become tech support tickets is the key to unlocking the true potential of user experience monitoring.

The truth is, your customers don't understand how complicated it is to develop websites and apps. All the time you spend breaking down silos, implementing lean and DevOps strategies, and creating cohesive testing units is only valuable if the end result is valuable. Customers only know when something isn't working. Sure! They can certainly enjoy something that's working really well. But it's when things break that they really take notice.

There's a reason that 62% of customers share bad experiences with other people. Poor experiences impact them. They notice when that page doesn't load, when that script breaks, and when your links take them to the wrong page. Here's the big secret. Digital experience monitoring isn't about delivering an experience that will drop customers on the floor in a euphoria-induced bliss. It's about making sure that they don't smash their hands against the desk when that page doesn't load.

To do this, you need an agentless synthetic monitoring solution that can mimic real user behaviors, test your app at every stage in the SDLC, and breakdown potential issues in a way that's easy for stakeholders to digest. You need 2 Steps.

How 2 Steps' End-User Experience Monitoring Solution Can Help You Maximize Your UX Ecosystem

Imagine being able to discover gaps in the user experience before your apps launch. Imagine getting video feedback of every UX issues that you can share with stakeholders. Imagine being able to plug-and-play an agentless synthetic monitoring solution that can run around-the-clock to detect UX issues before they become UX blunders.

That's the power of 2 Steps.

Not only does 2 Steps provide a best-in-class agentless synthetic monitoring solution that can be used across almost every OS and app ecosystem, but you can get 2 Steps data fed directly into your Splunk dashboard. That means rapid agentless synthetic monitoring that makes data digestion easy and gives you the results-driven user experience solution you need to test better, faster, and smarter.

2 Steps is fully integrated into Splunk, Citrix-ready, and requires no scripting or Selenium to utilize.

At 2 Steps, we understand that putting a tangible value on the customer experience is difficult. You aren't sure how to communicate the value of UX to stakeholders when there's no clear-cut path to profit. But the value of UX runs deep. Early investors in user experience stand to reap the rewards of a cohesive business ecosystem that's customer-centric and value-driven during every consumer interaction.

We've worked diligently to address all the typical user experience, end-user experience, and digital experience monitoring pain points that stall actionable results.

• Worried about adding another layer into your tech stack? We're fully integrated with Splunk to deliver the data you need into the dashboard you use.
• Wondering how user experience monitoring really saves time and money if you have to script every bot? We've removed the middle man. 2 Steps automated scripting to create a seamless plug-and-play experience.
• Trying to figure out how to communicate UX issues with stakeholders without throwing tech talk at them? We deliver high-quality videos of breakpoints that show you exactly what issues our scripts found.
• Frustrated about finding ways to apply end-user monitoring across app ecosystems? Our solution works across all applications, including virtual platforms like Citrix.

Here's the secret: End-user experience monitoring doesn't have to be nightmare fuel. With 2 Steps, you can instantly start finding critical UX issues at every stage during the SDLC. Are you wondering what that looks like in real-time? Book a demo and see the difference for yourself. The future of tech is in the user experience. Are you ready to embrace the future?