After many years of being just buzz words, new technology – Artificial Intelligence (AI) the Cloud or IoT – have made their way into businesses and have become an operational reality. The digital revolution has resolutely linked business and IT. But not only… Because, with the digital age, the customer experience has also become a fully fledged part of IT performance challenges. To meet the digital economy challenges and the zero-defect customer experience, businesses and public organizations have a compelling need to implement a business-aware IT strategy. On the I&O side, this results in an IT monitoring approach serving the customer experience.
Effect #1: moving from technical-centric IT to customer-centric IT
With the major changes of business models born of the digital revolution (uberization, e-commerce, etc.), IT Infrastructure and Operations teams, must move away from a technical approach towards one focused on customer experience. They must also take their share of:
- Reinventing the customer experience, hand in hand with Business, by digitalizing and personalizing a sales process that has become omni-channel,
- Accelerating time to market by developing new business models and/or services and modernizing IT through agile models applied to I&O,
- Managing mobility and 24/7 access from any terminal to strengthen the brand relationship and customer engagement, and thereby guarantee optimum IT performance 24/7,
- Leveraging from emerging technologies to develop a personalized and immediate customer experience,
- Integrating Cybersecurity into Business and IT challenges to limit the impact on brand image and guarantee IT performance (including data protection and regulatory compliance).
“Our transactional websites must run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Seamless access and availability for customers are crucial for business continuity, but also in protecting the company’s reputation.” – Thibaud Mori, Head of Operations & Infrastructure at the Parot Group (France)
Effect #2: IT and Business must work together to optimize the customer experience
Not a day goes by without someone talking about optimizing the customer experience. Great… but how? Given the level of imbrication between IT and Business, it will be difficult to achieve the Holy Grail of optimum customer experience without a good dose of alignment between IT and Business. Stuck in the same boat, IT and Business share the responsibility for delivering an excellent customer experience. Here is why business and I&O must work hand in hand:
- Omnichannel and its necessary 360° vision of the customer implies a unified and de-compartmentalized customer strategy, and therefore an alignment of the business and IT processes to control data and operational performance.
- The value chain perceived as unique by customers is in fact based on an increasingly complex IT. IT response times are therefore becoming crucial to meet the expectations of increasingly impatient consumers.
- The power of the customer experience is based on providing the right data, at the right time, to the right person, an essential factor for anticipating deteriorations and adjusting processes.
- A deteriorated (and unmeasured) customer experience has a direct impact on a business’s brand image. Application and IT performance measurement therefore has a very real role to play in brand image management.
“Application performance is a key element in measuring the quality of customer experience. High response times impact the customer experience. A too slow payment process can lead to customers abandoning a purchase…” – Pierrick Martel, Product Marketing at Centreon (France and Canada)
Effect #3: I&O must reinvent IT monitoring at the same time as Businesses reinvent the customer experience
You’ve got the picture: no optimum customer experience without a high-performant IT, and therefore without a radical change in IT monitoring practices! ITOps therefore have a vested interest in reviewing the way IT is monitored and in taking on new subjects inherent to the digital revolution.
First of all, we need to talk about new IT monitoring customers. Yes! Monitoring is now everyone’s problem, and in particular Business for whom knowing if the messaging system is working or if the e-commerce site is slow has now become critical. Thus, the COVID-19 crisis has made it possible to highlight the role of modern and efficient IT monitoring in a teleworking situation where IT is under very high strain.
Everyone uses the IT infrastructure and services and everyone has the right to be informed in real time about the health of IT thanks to simple and graphical dashboards.
“With IT monitoring, we provide genuine support to high school principals when they are faced with digital constraints. We dialogue with them faster and more simply to support them on a daily basis.” – Gérard Durandet – Head of the Digital High School services for the Nouvelle Aquitaine Region (France)
Another critical issue for ITOps: managing the increasing complexity and hybridization of IT… All businesses are faced with the fact that their good old monolithic IT has grown and developed to the point of mixing Cloud, on-premise, digital and legacy applications. And of course, it’s not enough to have this little world cohabit in a system that customers see as unified, it’s also and above all a question of knowing whether it works (or not). As a result, ITOps can get rid of their 2010 metrics and create new ones, allowing them to drive the digital value chain from the Cloud to Edge Computing (Local Infrastructure) from a single console…
And last but not least: ITOps must also get ready (and get the business ready) for permanent IT evolution. According to Gartner, the share of physical hardware in the IS will drop from 80% in 2019 to 30% in 2025. The pace of IT transformation is accelerating and is not expected to slow down for some time. This means that the implementation of a monitoring system capable of responding to the challenges of an optimized customer experience will necessarily involve a “Future-Ready” monitoring system, which is scalable and capable of anticipating technological innovations in order to optimize customer engagement.
How about (finally) moving from availability-centric monitoring to performance-centric monitoring?
Finally, I&O is undergoing a major paradigm shift in order to meet business requirements by moving from an IT monitoring model measuring hardware performance relative to IS availability, to a fully customer-centric model measuring and analysing IS performance at the service of the customer experience.
What about you? Are you Customer-Centric Ready?
Download this 32 page ebook including nearly 15 testimonials from companies operating innovative IT monitoring, to understand the challenges, best practices and perspectives of IT monitoring to support the customer experience.
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