At the heart of a successful digital enterprise is a commitment to customers. A slow or unresponsive website can quickly lead to costly calls to customer service, users leaving without completing their purchases or, worse, posting a negative experience on social media, affecting brand reputation and user retention. Industry leaders recognize this, and despite economic slowdowns, investments in digital experience monitoring (DEM) technologies have surged over the past two years. According to Gartner, DEM deployments are expected to rise from 60% to 90% by 2027 across all industry verticals.
More than 16,000 global enterprises already leverage DEM solutions like New Relic DEM to enhance customer experiences and perfect their digital presence, achieving tangible return on investment (ROI). Leaders like Mercado Libre, the largest ecommerce ecosystem in Latin America, increased conversions by reducing website response time to less than 50 milliseconds. Similarly, The Seven Network (commonly known as Channel 7), Australia’s #1 commercial television network, achieved 100% uptime during the live streaming of major events like the AFL Grand Final, and the 2020 Summer and 2022 Winter Olympics. These examples highlight how critical DEM is for business success.
Top takeaways
DEM matters more than ever
Let’s explore how DEM enables a smooth and efficient user experience, crucial to maintaining a competitive edge:
1. Increase customer satisfaction: If creating positive word-of-mouth promotion is important for your business—and it should be!—then DEM will help you ensure an uninterrupted user experience.
2. Boost performance: Optimizing modern applications infrastructure not only improves the overall health of the application, it also creates a more engaging user experience while boosting your bottom line.
3. Deliver high-quality experiences: Visibility from the user's perspective ensures all digital experience components are functioning correctly, delivering consistent and high-quality experiences across all digital channels.
4. Move from reactive to proactive: Real-time data on application performance and user interactions enables proactive issue identification and issue resolution before they impact end users.
5. Gaining a competitive advantage: from page load times to seamless navigation, DEM provides the visibility to every aspect of the digital experience to stay ahead of competitors.
6. Better data-driven decisions: DEM insights enable organizations to prioritize investments to meet user expectations by helping businesses understand user needs, preferences, and pain points.
7. Better risk management: Advanced DEM tools provide early detection of security and other risks that prevent larger, more costly issues down the line, reducing the risk of data breaches, security incidents and damaged brand reputation.
8. Rapid adoption of AI technologies: Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming business operations across all functions and DEM helps organizations track and analyze user interactions and behaviors, providing the insights needed to confidently adopt AI and maximize its value.
Getting started with digital experience monitoring
A fully-integrated, AI-powered DEM solution empowers businesses to monitor, analyze, and optimize the digital experiences across all digital touchpoints. By leveraging integrated monitoring tools like New Relic DEM, businesses gain critical insights across the organization to eliminate interruptions in digital experiences before they happen. New Relic DEM also enables organizations to adopt fast-evolving AI technologies like chatGPT, by monitoring real user interactions across all applications, including AI applications, enabling DevOps teams to identify incorrect AI responses, and flags user friction points. This ensures frictionless and consistent experiences wherever users interact, allowing enterprises to adopt AI with confidence.
Here are the must-have DEM components that allow you to gain actionable insights for your digital enterprise:
Real user monitoring (RUM)
RUM offers a holistic view of user interactions across both web and mobile platforms. These capabilities enable teams to identify performance bottlenecks quickly and optimize user paths. By tracking and analyzing detailed analytics, RUM enables teams to optimize and refine user experience based on insights, significantly enhancing user satisfaction and boosting conversion rates. New Relic integrated solution combines real user monitoring (RUM) capabilities, with APM 360, errors inbox, and AI monitoring in a single platform, to provide a complete view of the digital experience across the application stack, ensuring a full understanding of how the underlying network and infrastructure impacts experiences across different platforms.
Session replay
Session replay provides video-style playbacks of real user sessions, offering direct visibility into the user's perspective. This capability helps stakeholders agree on necessary improvements by showing exactly how customers interact with applications. By visualizing user sessions in a video-like format, businesses can identify issues down to the code level. Advanced solutions like New Relic session replay focuses on capturing 100% of critical incidents, like a failed form submission, that include the user actions leading up to each incident, offering superior insights without the expense of recording every single session, or the need for sifting through sample recordings.
Synthetic monitoring
Synthetic monitoring (or synthetic testing) ensures that applications are performing as expected by proactively testing apps for user errors to proactively prevent interruptions in digital experiences . When issues arise, synthetic monitoring also helps to quickly identify the cause through simulated user behavior. Synthetics can also simulate user behavior for various scenarios, device types, and geographic locations, helping teams understand application performance across the user ecosystem to better optimize what matters most. New Relic integrated synthetic monitoring uses a robot client application to send automated transactions, emulating user navigation through core application areas to find issues across the full application stack with APM, browser, mobile, serverless, and OTel entities. When synthetic monitoring detects errors, it sends them to the errors inbox and flags them for resolution, ensuring a smooth user experience.
Mobile user journeys (crash analysis)
Frequent mobile app crashes degrade user experience and delay development. Crash analysis helps deliver a more stable and reliable mobile app experience by identifying and addressing frequent issues, prioritizing bug fixes based on crash analysis data, to significantly improve app stability and enhance overall user experience. New Relic mobile user journeys streamlines this process as the only solution to provide automatic, dynamic, nonlinear charts without event duplication. It delivers detailed insights beyond basic page views, including breadcrumbs, HTTP events, and handled exceptions, facilitating quicker issue resolution and enhancing mobile user experiences.
Achieving digital success with New Relic DEM
Measuring and optimizing end-user experiences is no longer optional—it's a necessity for staying competitive in today's digital landscape. By integrating real user monitoring (RUM) capabilities like browser monitoring and mobile monitoring, as well as synthetic monitoring, with APM 360 and errors inbox, New Relic offers a unified approach that ensures complete visibility from the user perspective and control over digital experiences, faster incident management and optimization.
Next steps
To learn more about how New Relic DEM helps your business deliver exceptional user experiences and rapid business growth, click here.
Want to know what DEM means for your business? Try the New Relic Value Calculator and see the potential ROI for your organization.
The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of New Relic. Any solutions offered by the author are environment-specific and not part of the commercial solutions or support offered by New Relic. Please join us exclusively at the Explorers Hub (discuss.newrelic.com) for questions and support related to this blog post. This blog may contain links to content on third-party sites. By providing such links, New Relic does not adopt, guarantee, approve or endorse the information, views or products available on such sites.