Customer-impacting service disruptions can cost enterprises revenue and reputation. As businesses progress towards digitalization, maintaining an excellent customer experience has become a critical measure of an organization’s digital transformation success. For digital service providers, this requires modern architectures and new expectations for the way engineers, customer teams and business leaders work together. Responsibility for the customer experience is extended to multiple teams across technology organizations.
xMatters recently released the results of its Incident Management in the Age of Customer-Centricity research study to better understand the range of various incident management practices and how the increased focus on customer experience has caused roles across an organization to evolve. The study asked the opinions of over 300 DevOps and IT Ops practitioners and business leaders from organizations of varying sizes, including midsize and enterprise-level businesses, delivering digital services.
Findings highlight the ongoing challenges organizations face as they continue to introduce and rapidly evolve digital services. The research also found the importance of intelligent, automated approaches to simultaneously reduce incidents and to limit their impact when they do arise.
Maintaining the Pace of Innovation and the Customer Experience
The research found a gap that needs to be closed if organizations hope to continuously innovate and maintain service performance and availability. More than half of respondents (54%) said their organization delivers at least one new software release per week and a full 77% of respondents said the number of releases has increased by at least 25% over the past three years.
Unfortunately, legacy technology and overburdened talent is straining to keep up. For example, 57% of organizations report their customers experience a degradation in digital experiences, ranging from minor performance issues to major outages, on a daily or weekly basis.
Nearly 75% of survey respondents say that their ability to build out new services is sometimes or always affected by customer-impacting issues. This gap between the demand for new services and the need to provide an always-on, superior customer experience must be solved if the dream of the digitalization of business is to be realized.
Inefficient Incident Management Slows the Pace of Innovation
The vast majority of survey respondents (91.7%) representing myriad roles said that delivering a superior customer experience is a priority for them.
Previously, IT Ops alone was the group most commonly identified as being responsible for enabling the customer experience. This shift is important, as now nearly everyone across a technology enterprise shoulders part of the load and much of their time is lost to problem triage and working toward eventual resolution.
According to the survey, nearly half of development team leads indicated their developers spend more than 50% of their time manually addressing incidents. Already a huge concern, this sunk time is only going to become more painful as the pace of innovation continues to quicken.
Automation Helps Streamline Incident Management
There is reason for optimism in the survey results, too. Findings indicate that the modernization of incident management practices, including the use of more advanced IT tools and services, will dramatically aid in resolving issues at a faster pace through automation and by equipping enterprise employees with the information and resources needed to support digital transformation.
The majority of DevOps/SRE practitioners (84%), IT Operations practitioners (73%) and Developers (65%) surveyed believe emerging technologies like AI and ML will further improve their job performance.
These new advancements in incident management will aid companies as they continue to deliver quality services at a higher rate of speed. While the gap between an organization’s ability to innovate and maintain uptime is revealing, the modernization of incident management will equip employees to better serve their customers with critical insights and allow them to focus on service innovation.
The Latest
We're at a critical inflection point in the data landscape. In our recent survey of executive leaders in the data space — The State of Data Observability in 2024 — we found that while 92% of organizations now consider data reliability core to their strategy, most still struggle with fundamental visibility challenges ...
From the accelerating adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) to the ongoing challenges of cost optimization and security, these IT leaders are navigating a complex and rapidly evolving landscape. Here's what you should know about the top priorities shaping the year ahead ...
In the heat of the holiday online shopping rush, retailers face persistent challenges such as increased web traffic or cyber threats that can lead to high-impact outages. With profit margins under high pressure, retailers are prioritizing strategic investments to help drive business value while improving the customer experience ...
In a fast-paced industry where customer service is a priority, the opportunity to use AI to personalize products and services, revolutionize delivery channels, and effectively manage peaks in demand such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday are vast. By leveraging AI to streamline demand forecasting, optimize inventory, personalize customer interactions, and adjust pricing, retailers can have a better handle on these stress points, and deliver a seamless digital experience ...
Broad proliferation of cloud infrastructure combined with continued support for remote workers is driving increased complexity and visibility challenges for network operations teams, according to new research conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Broadcom ...
New research from ServiceNow and ThoughtLab reveals that less than 30% of banks feel their transformation efforts are meeting evolving customer digital needs. Additionally, 52% say they must revamp their strategy to counter competition from outside the sector. Adapting to these challenges isn't just about staying competitive — it's about staying in business ...
Leaders in the financial services sector are bullish on AI, with 95% of business and IT decision makers saying that AI is a top C-Suite priority, and 96% of respondents believing it provides their business a competitive advantage, according to Riverbed's Global AI and Digital Experience Survey ...
SLOs have long been a staple for DevOps teams to monitor the health of their applications and infrastructure ... Now, as digital trends have shifted, more and more teams are looking to adapt this model for the mobile environment. This, however, is not without its challenges ...
Modernizing IT infrastructure has become essential for organizations striving to remain competitive. This modernization extends beyond merely upgrading hardware or software; it involves strategically leveraging new technologies like AI and cloud computing to enhance operational efficiency, increase data accessibility, and improve the end-user experience ...
AI sure grew fast in popularity, but are AI apps any good? ... If companies are going to keep integrating AI applications into their tech stack at the rate they are, then they need to be aware of AI's limitations. More importantly, they need to evolve their testing regiment ...
