In retail, an expanded customer journey brings new IT challenges

Historically, retailers and their IT partners have looked at Black Friday and Cyber Monday as critical markers, wanting all technology and website changes to be locked ahead of the busiest shopping days of the year. They have wanted the customer journey to be free from the unexpected detours that lead to abandoned shopping carts. But these days, while companies must execute flawlessly during the major holiday season, they can't let any balls drop throughout the year. Customers have so many online options. For retailers, every day is a critical shopping day, and companies need to put their best foot forward. Otherwise, customers will walk away.

Sometimes, before a customer abandons a shopping cart, they will contact a customer service representative for assistance. Because companies know how important it is for their customer service teams to help customers navigate through their shopping journeys, companies are investing more tech resources into making sure that the employees’ digital experiences are free from hassles.

In the past, we've looked at the customer in-store and online digital experience as separate journeys, but those paths often converge as customers move from websites to in-store experiences to arrive at a purchase. If a man decides he wants to buy that famous blue raincoat, he may step into the nearest department store to touch the fabric. He may then pull out his phone to check online prices and delivery options or inventory at other stores if his size is not available.

Each checkpoint along the journey represents the possibility of failure and customer dissatisfaction at a time when customers are cranky and finicky about network failures and page load times. Customers are also beginning to expect more real-time product and delivery information. Is the in-store inventory accurate for specific store locations? Is the retailer able to connect a customer to both online and in-store purchases and visits? All this fast-moving data requires retailers to have great digital performance. As a result, companies are turning to unified observability tools that help them identify hotspots before they flare up into crises that result in missed sales.

When the man in the store contacts customer service for support, the customer service agent will follow a similar website journey that the customer follows with one exception, they're using different network equipment from a different location. Retailers need observability tools that monitor not only the performance of their retail websites but also each individual customer service agent’s machine to evaluate trouble spots in the context of whether it's unique to that machine and home Wi-Fi setup or endemic to machines across the ecosystem and therefore requires immediate attention.

Layered on top of this network infrastructure complexity, companies are under pressure due to pervasive staffing shortages. They are increasingly turning to tools that provide added context for alerts to prioritize IT issues and their impact on the business, offer visibility across historically segmented silos, and automate repetitive tasks. A recent survey showed that IT teams are trying to manage as many as six observability tools. Wrangling that many tools with limited IT staff keeps teams from not only focusing on day-to-day problems but also distracts them from working on strategic initiatives that can directly grow a company's bottom line.

To improve the customer journey, companies are making big bets on unified observability tools. According to a recent IDC survey, more than "50 percent of respondents indicated that their observability budgets will increase over the next two years, with 30 percent indicating an increase of 25 percent or more!" In an era of shrinking IT budgets, that is a significant increase.

Everyone is anticipating an economic slowdown. Consumers will be more cautious about where they spend their dollars. Companies need to provide digital experiences that enhance, not hamper, the digital journey. On the other side of the coin, even as companies shrink budgets, the tight labor market means that employees have choices. Studies have shown that employees will walk if their digital experiences are less than stellar. Unified observability addresses both of those problems, helping IT teams proactively identify potential bottlenecks before they become flood alerts to the customer service desk, resulting in lost sales and employee dissatisfaction. Companies and VCs are spending money on observability solutions because they know that if you want happy customers and happy employees, you have to get the roadblocks out of their way.

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Mike Marks is Vice President of Product Marketing, Riverbed.