BrainBlog for Hydrolix by Jason Bloomberg
Look beneath the user interface (UI) of any modern web site, mobile app, or streaming service, and you’ll find a plethora of individual services, ads, plug-ins, tags, and other third-party components, all of which contribute to how the end-customer experiences the interface.
Today, these technology touchpoints have become the primary interaction channels between organizations and their customers. For such digital organizations, the diverse and disparate elements that support the UI should work seamlessly together to provide the customer experience (CX) that users of today’s digital services have come to expect.
In particular, real-time behavior across all interfaces is essential for maintaining the CX – while the misbehavior of a single element can slow down the entire UI.
Even a delay of a second or two can lead to dissatisfied customers, abandoned shopping carts, customer churn, and other symptoms of a poor CX.
CX, however, is more than simply the behavior of a digital interface. CX involves all the connections between users and the companies they work with.
If a web site, app, or streaming service lets customers down, then it’s the company itself at fault.
For today’s digital organizations – and today, all enterprises are digital organizations – the CX of their digital interfaces are core to the promise companies make to their customers – what we call the brand promise.
CX is more than the UI
It’s not surprising that there are numerous tools on the market for monitoring and troubleshooting the UI. From real user monitoring (RUM) to user experience monitoring (UEM) and beyond, digital organizations have plenty of options for identifying the culprit responsible for a poor UI.
When the root cause of a problem is somewhere in the front end, then such UI-centric tooling can often troubleshoot such issues.
Similarly, organizations have plenty of observability and IT operations management tools for troubleshooting their back-end technologies.
In today’s real-time, multicloud world, however, root causes of problems could be anywhere – front end, back end, or anywhere in between.
When something goes wrong that adversely impacts the CX, therefore, uncovering the responsible party can be a fiendishly difficult challenge.
To ensure a CX that meets the brand promise, each organization must ensure that all elements of the CX meet expectations – front to back, across all the participants that support it.
Connecting back end and front end with edge services
The front end and the back end aren’t the whole story. In today’s hybrid multicloud world, everything between front and back is the edge.
Edge services – content delivery networks (CDNs) in particular, but also web application firewalls, edge compute resources, edge-based observability and security tools and more – are responsible for maintaining a brisk and functional UI, even when content is streaming in real-time to millions of users simultaneously.
Today’s streaming services simply wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for these edge technologies – and neither would all manner of modern apps and web sites.
In fact, today’s modern UIs consist of multiple components from multiple sources, and each one is likely to depend on its own edge services. Any slowdown or failure anywhere can adversely affect the UI – and with it, the overall CX.
Where the buck stops
Ensuring the front and back ends are working properly is only part of the CX battle. Organizations must also manage multiple CDNs and other edge services to ensure an optimal CX.
In the first article in this series, my colleague Jason English explained how edge services observability was essential for monitoring and troubleshooting the performance of multiple CDNs operating simultaneously in real time.
As English’s article argues, organizations must monitor and manage a broad diversity of edge services to maintain their CX – and to do that, they must rethink how they handle high volume, highly variable log data for multiple CDNs.
Each component element that serves a modern UI might come from a different organization, and each organization is responsible for the performance and behavior of the components under their control.
In a way, therefore, there are numerous people responsible for a particular service’s CX, scattered across several different organizations, often with competing priorities.
Who, then, has the final responsibility? Where does the buck stop?
To answer that question, look to the brand.
A company’s brand is far more than its logo or its marketing slogans. It’s a promise to customers that the company will deliver what customers expect and what they’re paying for.
The complexity and diversity of the digital technologies that support the CX are the face of any organization that provides those technologies to its customers.
Who, then, owns the customer experience at the end of the day? It’s the brand.
The Intellyx Take
The lesson of this article isn’t simply that the performance and behavior of the edge are essential to the CX – although that lesson is an important take-away.
The real lesson is that all the moving parts of the digital experience – back to front across all the separate components and their individual responsible parties – roll up into the brand promise that every organization makes to its customers.
Given the size and diversity of today’s log files, the comprehensive visibility necessary to maintain the CX is a tall order – one that Hydrolix is well-positioned to address.
It might seem that an offering like Hydrolix, a data lake custom-built to manage diverse log files in real-time, is an edge services tool for resolving edge-centered issues.
However, there’s more to the Hydrolix story. By supporting the overall CX, Hydrolix helps organizations maintain their brand promise, which is the highest calling of any digital effort.
Copyright © Intellyx BV. Hydrolix is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx maintains final editorial control of this article. No AI was used to write this article. Image credit: Yuya Tamai.
