Let’s face it: IT is obsessed with monitoring
Whether it’s backend servers, customer-facing websites, enterprise applications or, more recently, the end-user computing experience, it’s clear that there’s no shortage of tools available today for businesses to monitor their infrastructure experiences. employees, and customers.
However, despite rampant investment in these tools, we often hear statements like the quote above from frustrated tech leaders who need a more holistic view of the experience, one that takes into account the multitude of technologies, processes and journeys the user struggles to navigate. complete a basic task. IT is increasingly realizing that the current broken approach to experience tracking is no longer working. And this is because it is:
- Blind to the user journey. As employees or customers navigate a company’s systems, they will inevitably interact with multiple technologies. The problem is that all these technologies affect the user holistically. For example, a poor device experience is likely to affect the user’s perception of application performance, even though the two technologies have separate monitoring approaches.
- Expensive. Each category of discrete tracking comes with its own specific license, meaning IT must build a business case and justify ROI for multiple experience tools, a task that distracts from the bigger problem: understanding total user experience.
- Difficult to manage. The more tools IT has, the more experts it needs to support and operate them. Most experience tracking tools require a dedicated person to develop the tool, identify use cases, and track results. To make matters worse, each of these people may have different approaches to doing this.
Clearly, we have a problem, but what is the solution?
Forrester has just released what we believe is the answer to the conundrum of tracking the broken experience.
The answer is human-centered experience monitoring.
What is Human Centered Experience Monitoring?
Ultimately, a human-centric approach to experience tracking shifts the focus away from discrete technologies and onto the individual’s journey to complete tasks. For an employee, that might mean navigating a corporate app to look up customer information. For a customer, this might mean trying to make a purchase on a company’s website. A human-centric focus understands that there are many factors that affect the user experience, such as distinct technologies, previous interactions with the company, expectations around the experience, and more. Think about your most recent travel experience from booking airline tickets, adjusting to route changes, flight delays, lost luggage, missed connections, etc. , not subtly — shape the traveler experience with the airline.
According to Forrester, there are six key areas that differentiate the old way (i.e., the broken approach) from the new way (i.e., the human-centered way). They are:
- Holistic telemetry. Human-centric experience monitoring takes into account many types of data from many technologies to understand the user, including emotion.
- Open standards. Although the industry does not have standard definitions of experience, Forrester believes we are moving in that direction, especially if independent software vendors increasingly open up data about their applications to monitoring tools.
- Personalization. Personas just don’t cut it anymore — personalization is the future. Human-centric experience tracking will keep in mind the preferences, expectations and past interactions of the unique individual.
- Prognostic rehabilitation. From reactive to proactive to predictive, human-centric experience monitoring will take personalized input from employees and customers and begin to predict what types of actions and events will most impact their experience in the future.
- Natural language. Generative AI brings natural language processing to every experience tracking tool. Expect less GUI and more natural language search lines.
- Design focus. Ultimately, the problem with monitoring tools is that they end up identifying challenges that they simply cannot solve. Is app navigation slow? Maybe the user interface needs a refresh. Ultimately, the future of experience tracking will move managers away from mere tracking and turn them into designers.
This blog was written by Principal Analyst Andrew Hewitt and Principal Analyst Carlos Casanova and originally appeared here.
