Approximately 70% of users abandon their shopping carts solely due to a poor end-user experience. Creating a seamless experience for end users is crucial for enhancing customer loyalty and establishing a positive brand reputation. The user-friendliness of a product plays a pivotal role in its success and recognition within the mass market. If a product’s usability is lacking, customers may choose to opt for the services of a competitor instead. Therefore, it is essential to proactively identify and address any potential performance issues before they negatively impact end users. A smooth, hassle-free experience subsequently results in better conversion rates.
So, how can you enhance the end-user experience? How can you effectively identify and overcome obstacles in your applications before they affect the end users? How can you ensure that your app’s navigation and interactions are user-friendly? End-user experience monitoring is the ultimate solution for addressing all of these questions and ensuring an improved user experience for your app’s navigation and interactions.
What is end-user experience monitoring?
End-user experience monitoring (EUEM), also referred to as end-user monitoring, allows organizations to monitor applications, web applications, networks, web servers, and devices from the perspective of the end users. EUEM helps you ensure the quality of IT products and services throughout the entire business entity, aiming to maximize productivity.
EUEM solutions offer a distinct approach compared to domain-specific monitoring tools that concentrate on analyzing the health, availability, and performance of specific elements of the infrastructure. EUEM tools primarily specialize in monitoring IT applications from the end-user perspective across multiple locations beyond the corporate firewall.
Advantages of EUEM
As a result of the pandemic, many businesses have started to heavily depend on their web applications and websites, making end-user satisfaction a critical performance metric for the success of the business. The user experience and enterprise revenue go hand in hand. Thus, enterprises constantly strive to keep their websites rapid and user-friendly without facing any downtime.
Most businesses become aware of their application performance issues through their end users. Therefore, by investing in and adopting the right set of tools and technologies, you can ensure customer satisfaction. Based on a report by DataBridge Market Research, the EUEM market is projected to experience a growth rate of 11.40% from 2021 to 2028.
Why do you need end-user monitoring?
Here are some of the reasons EUEM is critical for businesses:
Comprehensive visibility: EUEM allows you to acquire instant visibility into the end users’ interactions with the applications, web pages, devices, and network pathways, thereby revealing application performance on a granular level.
Faster issue detection and resolution: By employing an end-user monitoring tool, you can easily identify, troubleshoot, and resolve end-user experience problems, decreasing the MTTD and MTTR.
Time and resource preservation: Using an EUEM solution, organizations can automate the data mining and evaluation process involved in analyzing end-user experiences. This automation brings several advantages, including enhanced data accuracy, improved efficiency, real-time monitoring capabilities, support for scalability, and optimal resource utilization.
Business impact assessments: An EUEM tool enables businesses to determine the effect of third-party solutions on the user experience, providing maximum efficiency and quickly resolving any concerns. You can make key business decisions and IT investments by obtaining informative reports.
Informed decision-making: By comprehending an application’s impact on the end-user experience, companies can extract valuable insights to make data-driven decisions and ultimately enhance the overall user experience.
EUEM’s role in the IT sector
In today’s market where most goods and services are promoted on web apps and websites, there is an abundance of customer data, which could overburden the IT ecosystem. Moreover, owing to high competition, enterprises aim for an interactive, user-friendly experience by including CTAs, which adds to the complexity for IT admins.
With an EUEM solution, you can capture the crashes, errors, page load times, response times, and usability to gain valuable insights that will help you tackle issues and enhance the end-user experience. Such a solution also lets you measure the impact of third-party APIs, enforce service-level agreements, and proactively manage transactions and performance issues in real time.
14 best practices to follow when monitoring the end-user experience
By following these best practices, organizations can ensure a superior end-user experience, align with business objectives, and drive continuous improvement in their digital offerings:
1. Measure what matters: Focus on measuring and understanding users’ perspectives and expectations to provide consistently great experiences. Avoid relying solely on observability data and adopt a customer-focused monitoring approach.
2. Assess third-party impacts: Identify and address issues caused by third-party failures to minimize their impacts on the applications that depend on third-party services.
3. Discover shadow IT and infrastructure: Identify and monitor shadow IT and infrastructure resources, especially in remote work scenarios. Understand their dependencies, usage patterns, and performance to ensure reliable environments.
4. Align with business goals: Integrate key performance indicators (KPIs) and innovation goals into your EUEM solution. Use the solution’s insights to optimize application infrastructure, improve KPIs, and innovate customer experiences.
5. Set up meaningful alerts: Configure alerts that trigger based on performance issues affecting your systems. Optimize and customize them to monitor relevant performance metrics and receive timely notifications for prompt issue resolution.
6. Test across multiple locations: Validate application performance from various geographic locations to ensure consistent user experiences worldwide. Employ tools that allow remote testing and troubleshooting.
7. Implement transaction monitoring: Go beyond monitoring performance and loading times to simulate real user interactions, such as registration and checkout processes. Monitor and optimize these critical transactions to enhance the overall user experience.
8. Monitor SSL certificates: Ensure the timely renewal and proper functioning of SSL certificates to prevent unsecured connections and error messages. Monitor certificate statuses and address any issues promptly to avoid negative user experiences.
9. Optimize root cause analysis: Prioritize and invest in resources effectively by conducting thorough root cause analysis. Maximize your impact and effectiveness by focusing on resolving critical issues that significantly affect user experiences.
10. Test the performance of new features: Before deploying new features or solutions, test their performance to identify and address any issues that could impact the user experience. Optimize applications for both mobile and desktop devices during testing.
11. Share actionable data with marketing teams: Leverage EUEM data to improve digital marketing campaigns. Gain insights into user behavior, target users effectively, and communicate any downtime or performance-related issues.
12. Collaborate with related monitoring solutions: Integrate your EUEM solution with transaction tracing, log management, and infrastructure monitoring tools. Correlate metrics and logs to troubleshoot issues, identify bottlenecks, and gain comprehensive insights.
13. Mitigate the impacts of performance issues: Improve performance management to reduce bounce rates and increase conversions. Faster websites and applications enhance user engagement, retention, and overall business performance.
14. Assess the business impacts of website performance: Understand the relationship between website or application performance and business growth. Measure and optimize load times to increase conversions and revenue.
ManageEngine Applications Manager offers EUEM capabilities with which you can seamlessly monitor the end-user experience and easily optimize application performance. Improve the user experience and operational efficiency by tracking the round-trip times and the response times of critical network services, such as DNS, LDAP, mail servers, ping, real browser monitoring (RBM), and Telnet.
In addition to its robust monitoring capabilities, Applications Manager has the capacity to delve into various infrastructure levels to identify, analyze, and troubleshoot any issues. It supports over 150 infrastructure elements so that you can monitor and troubleshoot your applications and the technologies they’re dependent on from a single console.
New to Applications Manager? Learn and explore on your own with a free, 30-day trial. Alternatively, you can opt for a more guided experience by scheduling a personalized demonstration.
