Business Service Reliability: Correlating the Customer Experience and Business Outcomes
December 12, 2013
Tony Davis
Share this

A recent poll on Business Service Reliability (BSR) found that IT needs to put an increased focus on managing and measuring the customer experience to improve business outcomes.

The poll — conducted by IDG Research Services on behalf of CA Technologies — sought to determine how organizations measure both BSR and the customer experience that IT provides. Business Service Reliability is a new approach to helping IT transform by providing a clearly-defined framework for managing and measuring customer interactions.

The majority of respondents (58 percent) are using a combination of surveys and other metrics (e.g. application downtime and call-center volume) to measure the customer experience.

Just over one quarter (26 percent) reported that IT delivers an exceptional experience. The majority of respondents (61 percent) classified the customer experience as adequate.

The remainder described it as inconsistent – the customer experience meets the expectations of the business some, but not all, of the time.

Lack of a single unified view of application health and customer experience (45 percent) was cited as the top obstacle to providing an exceptional customer experience, followed by inability to link end-user transaction issues to infrastructure, application and network components (35 percent), and difficulty prioritizing application issues and problems based on business impact (35 percent).

Improved customer satisfaction, loyalty and acquisition (65 percent) were chosen as the top benefits of Business Service Reliability, followed by faster delivery of new services (45 percent) and increased productivity (45 percent).

Increased communication with the lines of business to determine where the problems lie was the number one action item for improving Business Service Reliability, followed by investments in Infrastructure Management and Application Performance Management.

IT organizations need to better understand and optimize the customer's end-user experience with business services, rather than merely tracking metrics and thresholds for the various servers, storage, network and software components that support end-to-end service delivery. While components can be up 99.99 percent of the time, a customer may still have a bad experience with a service.

In today’s competitive market, customer experience has become one of the most critical ways to differentiate a business. By focusing on the 5 nines of customer experience rather than the 5 nines of availability, IT can help ensure every link in the service delivery chain is not only available, but is performing as intended and interacting appropriately to consistently deliver successful customer interactions.

By taking a formulaic approach to quantifying key success metrics, Business Service Reliability enables IT to concentrate on making sure every customer interaction is successful. IT organizations that succeed at managing the holistic service, rather than just the availability of supporting components, can deliver greater value to the business and spend less of their time clearing irrelevant alerts from their monitoring consoles.

ABOUT Tony Davis

Tony Davis is a 23 year veteran of the IT industry with a specialty in IT service reliability and strategy, currently serving as a Vice President of Solution Strategy & Sr. Consulting Fellow for CA Technologies North American Service Assurance business. Davis is the author of If My Availability is So Good, Why Do My Customers Feel So Bad?, a pragmatic guide to the 5 nines of customer experience.

Share this

The Latest

March 27, 2024

Nearly all (99%) globa IT decision makers, regardless of region or industry, recognize generative AI's (GenAI) transformative potential to influence change within their organizations, according to The Elastic Generative AI Report ...

March 27, 2024

Agent-based approaches to real user monitoring (RUM) simply do not work. If you are pitched to install an "agent" in your mobile or web environments, you should run for the hills ...

March 26, 2024

The world is now all about end-users. This paradigm of focusing on the end-user was simply not true a few years ago, as backend metrics generally revolved around uptime, SLAs, latency, and the like. DevOps teams always pitched and presented the metrics they thought were the most correlated to the end-user experience. But let's be blunt: Unless there was an egregious fire, the correlated metrics were super loose or entirely false ...

March 25, 2024

This year, New Relic published the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance Report to share insights derived from the 2023 Observability Forecast on the adoption and business value of observability across the financial services industry (FSI) and insurance sectors. Here are seven key takeaways from the report ...

March 22, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 2, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and AIOps ...

March 21, 2024

In the course of EMA research over the last twelve years, the message for IT organizations looking to pursue a forward path in AIOps adoption is overall a strongly positive one. The benefits achieved are growing in diversity and value ...

March 20, 2024

Today, as enterprises transcend into a new era of work, surpassing the revolution, they must shift their focus and strategies to thrive in this environment. Here are five key areas that organizations should prioritize to strengthen their foundation and steer themselves through the ever-changing digital world ...

March 19, 2024

If there's one thing we should tame in today's data-driven marketing landscape, this would be data debt, a silent menace threatening to undermine all the trust you've put in the data-driven decisions that guide your strategies. This blog aims to explore the true costs of data debt in marketing operations, offering four actionable strategies to mitigate them through enhanced marketing observability ...

March 18, 2024

Gartner has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024: Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider ...

March 15, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 1, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and network management ...