User experience is king in the enterprise world. If employees and customers don’t feel they are one of a company’s top priorities, they will go elsewhere – and in today’s digital world, people have umpteen other choices at their fingertips. 

This digital environment also makes investing in user experience (UX) different than it has been for enterprises in the past. Now, enhancing UX critically depends on improving customers’ and employees’ digital experience through digital experience monitoring (DEM). 

Enterprises that invest in DEM see significant cost savings thanks to everything from fewer support tickets and less network downtime, to improved brand reputation, customer retention, and conversation rates.

Let’s look at this in depth.

What is Digital Experience Monitoring?

Digital experience monitoring refers to the process of tracking, analyzing, and optimizing users’ experiences with a company’s digital assets and services. DEM solutions focus on:

• The End User: Whether looking at websites, applications, or cloud services, DEM solutions provide insights from the end user’s perspective. This allows enterprises to confidently assure end users that all services will be responsive and reliably meet their needs at all times.
• Real-time Visibility: DEM solutions deliver real-time insights into users’ experiences with all digital ecosystems. These insights comprehensively cover user interactions and infrastructure performance. 
• Proactive Optimization: Thanks to real-time insights, DEM empowers enterprises to respond proactively to issues within the digital ecosystem. This means that these issues are often resolved before they impact users.

Enterprises can choose between a number of different DEM tools, including:

• Endpoint monitoring: These tools analyze the performance and behavior of endpoint devices such as phones, tablets, and desktops.

• Application performance monitoring: These DEM tools specifically analyze the performance of applications. This includes identifying slow response times and other issues.

• Network performance monitoring: Network performance monitoring tools identify issues such as packet loss and high latency.

• User monitoring: These tools capture analytics from user interactions with digital assets and services. They provide important insights into what users are doing and how digital services are responding.

• Synthetic transaction monitoring: These tools emulate the actions of users. They are used to test for appropriate responses and potential issues so that problems can be identified before they impact users.

• A solution that combines one or more of the above

How to Set Up Digital Experience Monitoring

The first thing enterprises need to do is identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) most valuable in regards to their users’ digital experience, as well as the user journeys that best epitomize the ideal digital experience. When doing this:

• Be as specific as possible
• Ask for input from stakeholders in each department

Once the KPIs and user journeys are defined, enterprises can select the appropriate DEM tools or combination solutions that best support their needs. We recommend looking for tools/solutions that:

• Are vendor agnostic so they keep supporting a company regardless of how digital vendors change
• Are scalable and will easily grow with a business
• Are easy to use and install
• Come with great customer support should a company have questions about how to integrate the tool and/or utilize it
• Have high customer satisfaction from current users

Once the DEM tools/solutions are adopted, the next step is to integrate them with a company’s existing analytics tools and network. If an enterprise has adopted more than one DEM tool, we recommend integrating them one at a time over several days, rather than all at once. This way, should there be any disruption to current infrastructure and the digital experience, IT will know which tool caused the issue and can take quick steps to resolve any problems. 

Finally, once all solutions are in place, continue monitoring and analyzing all KPIs and user journeys to be sure that the analytics returned from the DEM solutions are addressing the actual and potential issues affecting users’ digital experience. As business goals, objectives, and user expectations evolve, update your DEM strategy as needed.

How DEM Improves Business Outcomes

Cost Savings Through Improved Efficiency

When DEM tools proactively identify issues before users are impacted, enterprises see a reduced need for reactive fixes that often involve network and application downtime, or limited access to an end device. This allows employees to remain productive, and means issues are usually identified when they are small – both which save companies money.

Increased Revenue

Seamless digital experiences and faster, optimized digital services lead to:

• Higher conversion rates
• Boosted customer loyalty
• Reduced churn  
• Better employee engagement and employee retention

These factors, in turn, all result in increased revenue for enterprises.

Improved Decision Making

DEM doesn’t only support in-the-moment decision making but also delivers insights that support better long-term, strategic decision making. These solutions, thanks to their in-depth user analytics, give enterprise executives priceless insight into how their products and services are meeting user needs – and what users are actually looking for/needing.

With these data-driven insights, enterprises can more effectively allocate resources and continue surpassing user expectations for years to come.

Our DEM Picks

The Wyebot DEX Agent for individual user devices

• Endpoint monitoring + user monitoring + application monitoring + network performance monitoring 

DEX Agent (Digital Experience Monitoring) is an application that runs as a background Windows service on individual user devices. 

It works with Intel WiFi chipsets, and the Intel Connectivity Analytics program, to send telemetry data to the Wyebot cloud infrastructure. With DEX, IT professionals have in-depth knowledge of the performance and behavior of end user devices. Professionals can keep all users and devices connected, proactively and remotely, for seamless business continuity, protected brand reputation, enhanced employee productivity, and long-term success.

DEX Agent:

• Proactively identifies the root cause of issues
• Drills into specific device performance
• Reduces Mean Time to Resolution
• Keeps track of WiFi experience as users move throughout their workspace
• Monitors WiFi coverage and signal strength
• Identifies dead spots
• Remotely runs network tests on end user devices
• Provides complete performance visibility into end user devices from remote locations
• Deep dives into Microsoft Teams

Wireless Intelligence Platform for network-wide support

• Endpoint monitoring + user monitoring + application monitoring + network performance monitoring 

The Wireless Intelligence Platform (WIP) combines on-premise sensor hardware with cloud-based patented software to provide advanced wireless optimization algorithms and next-generation predictive analytics. WIP works across all verticals to eliminate WiFi-disrupting issues, whether that be for an enterprise, warehouse, manufacturing facility, school, or a healthcare organization.

WIP:

• Provides complete network ecosystem visibility
• Is vendor-agnostic
• Delivers client monitoring for IoT devices
• Delivers remote network access to IT professionals
• Runs network tests over multiples APs and frequency bands using a single sensor
• Sends proactive, automatic alert notifications
• Supports WiFi 6 (802.11ax)
• Classifies APs + client devices via device fingerprinting
• Automatically compiles real-time and historical analytics (historical analytics include health and performance trends over time for APs, Client Distribution, RF and Client Utilization, RSSI, Non-WiFi Interference, and Noise Level)

Organizations that use WIP love its delivery of improved operational efficiency, personalized network support, future-proofed network planning, higher end-user satisfaction, plug-and-play simplification, and vendor agnostic design.

Request a demo or free trial of WIP here.

Whichever DEM tools/solutions your enterprise chooses to adopt, the end goal is always improved user satisfaction and brand reputation. Invest wisely, get the insights you need for your specific organization, and prepare your company to lead the way, no matter what the future brings. If you have any questions, our expert, all-human teams are here to help.