Catchpoint is an enterprise-proven Digital Experience Observability industry leader, empowering teams to confidently own the end user experience. The company provides unparalleled visibility and insight into every critical system that collectively produce and deliver digital experiences to customers and employees, proactively and rapidly detecting and repairing problems before they impact users.
To find out more, VMblog reached out to Mehdi Daoudi, the CEO and Co-Founder of Catchpoint.
VMblog: Let's kick things off by asking, what is
Digital Experience?
Mehdi Daoudi: While digital experience may mean something
different from one company to the next, the core definition remains the same. A
digital experience, or end-user experience, refers to a collection of digital
interactions between a business and its customers, and the type of impression
made during those interactions.
Digital experiences can take on many forms and can be
both lengthy or short in duration and frequency. For example, a digital
experience could simply be the act of a customer accessing your website or
mobile application, or it could relate to deep system integrations and regular
use of subscription services. Either way, each digital touchpoint with your
brand, regardless of its size or perceived importance, impacts various aspects
of the customer's digital experience.
VMblog: Why is that important today?
Daoudi: Ensuring
digital experience reliability is vital to protect and advance the experience
of customers and employees.
The
world has never been as dependent on digital technology as it is today, nor has
the digital landscape been so complex or distributed. Everything we do as
humans and machines relies on something digital. We order coffee, food, or an Uber
digitally. Digital experiences are pervasive, and consumers and
workers expect a flawless experience. Operations and production teams must
successfully deliver those services across an ever-changing and extraordinarily
complex digital chain of infrastructure, networks, and services. And in a
digital world, failures or delays pose an existential business risk.
Since
the pandemic so profoundly changed our digital lives, people have increasingly
less tolerance for sites or apps that don't work. Suppose a user can't find a
product or service on a website or mobile platform in 5 or 6 clicks. They will
look elsewhere - Amazon and Google are only a click away.
A bad
experience is bad for the brand, bad for revenue, and bad for the reputation of
any company.
VMblog: What are the
challenges facing enterprises when it comes to understanding and managing
Digital Experience of users?
Daoudi: While
most businesses understand the basic concept of managing their customers'
"digital experience," many do not recognize the key ingredients to its
long-term success-performance
monitoring and optimization.
Getting
the most out of your digital technologies requires a transparent view of your
IT infrastructure and how well it supports the needs of your customers. Digital
Experience Monitoring (DEM) solutions help companies manage both of these
priorities effectively by bridging the gap between system performance and
reliability with positive end-user experiences.
With so many areas affecting the overall delivery of your
applications and services, it's critical to monitor as many elements from as
many places as possible. If problems arise, you can't fix what you can't see or
measure. Digital experience monitoring is about creating this transparency,
giving businesses the actionable insight they need to address performance
issues before impacting the user and the brand.
VMblog: What is
Digital Experience Observability and how is it different to Observability?
Daoudi: In control theory, observability is defined
as a measure of how well the internal states of a system can be inferred from
knowledge of its external outputs. Digital
Experience Observability eliminates blind spots and prevents outages that hurt
your users' digital experience. A Digital Experience
Observability platform is proactive and
transforms observed telemetry data from the entire digital delivery chain into
preventative actions
VMblog: What are the
best practices for managing Digital Experience?
Daoudi: 80%
of performance and availability issues occur outside your firewall but
customers and consumers will only blame the brand - the brand is ultimately
responsible. That's why an end-to-end observability solution is so important.
Developing an observability strategy with deep visibility provides insights
across the service delivery chain to enable rapid detection, identification and
resolution of issues.
A
strong Digital Experience Observability program includes an end-to-end
strategy, rigorous data analysis and visualizations, and proactive monitoring
for failures.
The
ideal Digital Experience Monitoring solution offers multiple node types to
tailor towards your specific use case, which can be used holistically. It can be helpful, for instance, to
correlate data from last-mile nodes with more consistent backbone and broadband
provider locations.
VMblog: And finally, where do you see the industry headed in
2022?
Daoudi: The
past several years has changed so many behaviors, from how we work to where we
work from, how we shop, how we learn, and many more. The Internet will continue to drive these
behaviors which means the post-pandemic digital transformation acceleration is
here to stay and businesses and industries will embrace it.
Applications
will become ever more complex as new smart city, AR/VR, and other MEC and IoT
use cases are deployed. Businesses concerned about enhancing customer
experience and providing increased value will embrace the opportunity to deploy
a Digital Experience Observability solution. While none of us want all of our
interactions to be digital, when we do engage digitally, we want that
experience to be exceptional.
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