Banish Your Blind Spots to See More and Deliver Winning Digital Experiences – Cisco Blogs

We’ve all been there before—exasperated by an app, website, or tech platform that won’t do its thing. Maybe an error message pops up. Or you’re stuck, phone in hand, as a loading icon spins away on your screen like a wheel of fortune gone rogue.

A bad digital experience is all too familiar. For technology leaders, it’s the last thing you want for your customers or organization. Behind the scenes, a blame game is swirling, with various teams finger-pointing: “It’s not my issue—go check over there.”

The problem lies hidden in a blind spot. And what you can’t see, you can’t fix.

Meanwhile, customers are fuming and dropping off in droves. Employees are frustrated and productivity is tanking. The glitch has real and immediate bottom-line consequences—a dollar amount that you can measure with every minute of downtime and every frustrated customer.

According to the App Attention Index, 66% of people say they avoid brands known for delivering a poor digital experience. And 83% of customers who have an issue with digital services don’t notify the brand for a chance to put things right.

Observability Is Your Superpower

Fortunately, there’s a solution at your fingertips. It’s called ‘observability’, and it gives you a kind of x-ray vision to penetrate the vast and complex data ecosystem that underpins application delivery like never before. Yet, observability is more than just visibility—it lets you see the full context of the ecosystem, with all its interdependencies and correlations, to arrive at better insights.

Think of it as an evolved form of monitoring that helps you peer into every nook and cranny of your digital business applications and experiences, as well as the interplay between them. With observability, you can instantly pinpoint any problem, anywhere—whether it’s with an ISP or SaaS infrastructure, hybrid or multicloud third-party API, or even the Wi-Fi at a customer’s home.

In other words, you can spot your blind spots. And what you can spot, you can fix.

Observability is a must-have today, because the technology landscape that you’re playing in is more complex and expansive than ever. So when something goes wrong, there are often many factors at work, whether it’s a glitchy customer interaction or an employee struggling with an enterprise platform.

From VPNs and Office365 to real-time chat and e-commerce services, every app or platform draws on many elements at the same time. And with more employees working remotely these days, there are more Internet providers and home networks in the mix, too. That’s a lot of places for blind spots to lurk.

It’s also a lot of data to sift through when you’re looking for a problem to fix. Often, this deluge of data can make it hard for IT teams to know what to resolve first, or even where to start. That’s the beauty of the business context that observability gives you. With these extra insights in hand, your teams can quickly decide what issues to tackle first, based on what’s affecting your business the most.

Let’s say your website is sluggish yet live, but another issue is blocking your shopping cart transactions. You’d likely want to tackle the e-commerce crisis first, as it’s costing you money. By adding a business lens to observability, your teams will have that insight—instantly.

Delivering True Business Outcomes

When you use observability to cut through your blind spots, you can boost several key metrics. One of these is mean time to isolation (MTTI)—or, the average time it takes to isolate a problem. (Some jokingly call it “mean time to innocence” because it’s the amount of time a tech team takes to prove that their systems aren’t the problem.)

Naturally, you want your MTTI to be as fast as possible. The sooner you isolate an issue, the quicker you resolve it—even if it lies outside your team’s jurisdiction and requires a third-party fix. While MTTR (mean time to repair) may be beyond your control in some cases, MTTI is very much in the hands of your organization when you have observability on your side.

It also helps you lower expenses and track how well you’re using your resources. With observability across the full stack of available data and the entire digital experience, you can identify where the workloads powering your apps are best placed, right-size your IT environments, and be more efficient in your costs.

Crucially, you can combat the threat of lost revenue, especially when e-commerce or customer service is involved. Because customers are quick to churn when an app performs poorly, and lost customers don’t come back.

It all comes down to what kind of digital experience you can provide—whether it’s for customers or employees in your team. No one wants to see that error message or endlessly spinning loading icon. Time is money, and tolerance for poor performance is low.

So, crack down on your blind spots. Give everyone the best possible digital experience with the power of observability.

Discover how to do it with Optimized Application Experiences.

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