Riverbed has announced the results of key local research which reveals that 85% of respondents claimed end-user digital experience would play a ‘significant’ role in driving business growth for their companies. As a result, Middle East organisations looking to grow their business and raise customer and employee satisfaction in 2019, would be well advised to invest in technologies that enable them to monitor and improve the experiences users have when utilising their enterprise applications.
“Business models are rapidly changing as digital services make it possible for users to engage with organisations at any time, and from anywhere. When properly delivered, this 24/7/365 service availability and exposure can enhance customer experience, engagement, and loyalty, while also contributing to higher productivity and satisfaction among employees,” explained Elie Dib, Regional Vice President, EMEA Emerging Markets, at Riverbed.
“On the other hand, if the performance and usability of digital services cannot be assured, it could have a significant and long-lasting impact on the brand. The digital experiences of the user – whether an employee, customer, partner, or citizen – is therefore crucial to businesses and governments in the Middle East,” he added. Despite understanding this pressing need to ensure positive digital experiences, the majority (63%) of respondents still face readiness issues as their networks are overwhelmed by the growing volume of applications and services. Consequently, 62% admitted their inability to monitor and measure the performance of enterprise apps as is actually experienced by users on their endpoint devices.
Another likely reason for this shortcoming is that despite dramatic changes in customer expectations of digital services, organizations continue to rely primarily on age-old established metrics when assessing the performance of their applications, with 49% of respondents highlighting their perception of availability and reliability as being the key metrics to consider. The advancement and automation of networking and connectivity technologies mean that today, ensuring such high-availability is achievable even with only modest effort by IT teams. The next set of application performance metrics organisations currently monitor most closely are average response time (44%) and throughput/bandwidth ( 31%).
However, addressing the digital experience, which is proving to be equally critical to success, requires measuring actual end-user experience – something only 24% of respondents were capable of tracking.
With these gaps in their monitoring abilities, it is no wonder that 68% of respondents admitted to being surprised by complaints of poor performance from end-users. “Since today’s multi-layered application delivery models are so complex, without the ability to pinpoint and understand the issues users face, it’s monumentally challenging to improve their experiences,” said Dib. “Traditional tools monitor the network and applications by ‘looking out’ from the data centre resulting in a visibility gap between what your tools are telling you and what your users are actually experiencing. Instead, the ideal scenario for measuring the digital and end-user experience is to ‘look in’ from the end-user’s perspective. This approach can provide clear insights into how customers are consuming applications, what their digital experience is like, and how that experience impacts their main business KPIs.”
Looking ahead, it is clear that consumers and employees in the Middle East will continue to push for more services to be delivered via digital channels. Respondents to Riverbed’s survey believe that if their organisations could add new features and functionality to their applications (49%) or ensure consistent high-performance and usability of existing services (47%), they would be able to improve the perception these tech-savvy users have of their digital services.
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