Accelerating Digital Transformation with Business Assurance

Digital transformation is not merely about customer-facing applications, services and functionality, but the customer experience is most definitely a key factor and catalyst for the innovative technology changes that are occurring. User experience is intertwined with IT projects like cloud and IoT together with gauging application or service performance to make sure they are supporting business expectations. The overwhelming majority of marketers believe that customer experience will be the primary way customers differentiate between competitors by the year 2017. Don't look now, but that's a scant 6 months away.

The Age of the Customer Ushers in the Age of Digital Transformation (and Vice Versa)


The Age of the Customer applies to both B2C and B2B businesses. Just like consumers, business shoppers tend to begin their research phase on a desktop computer, later switching over to a tablet or smartphone to continue their research, and often swapping devices again at the time of purchase. They might also change the user identities they use during this process, making the buyer journey especially difficult to track.

As we enter the Age of the Customer, it is important to realize that customers are in the driver's seat when it comes to how, when, how often, and to what extent they interact with the businesses they deal with. Pelted by more and more messages from various brands and businesses, the customer expects to be able to access whatever content (s)he wants at any given time, with no resistance. The customer also demands that the content be delivered in the format they prefer and available on whatever device they choose to use -- no matter what interface, screen size, or platform that may be.

Providing this high level of access with a stellar user experience across devices takes a coordinated, streamlined effort across the entire business. The organizational structure, the corporate culture, and the technology used by the business must all work in concert to deliver top-tier service to the customer at all times. IT complexity, scale and speed is growing in the Digital Economy, but at the same time successful business outcomes depend on the uninterrupted and secure flow of information supporting business services. That means accelerating digital transformation requires real-time actionable insight to assure service delivery from DevOps to the production environment, and provide comprehensive reporting to operations, development, and business functions. The digital experience and the customer experience are fully and completely merged into one, and therefore require harnessing IP intelligence for business assurance. All of the efforts toward digital transformation must be directly in line with goals to improve the customer experience, either directly or indirectly.

The End Goal is Customer Satisfaction First, Which Translates Into Revenue Later


It isn't that revenue is no longer important. Revenue will always be critical to the success of any business. The change is that revenue takes a back seat to providing the customer the experience they desire. From that goal, improvements in revenue flow naturally, assuming it's done right.

The driving force behind digital transformation is the business need to utilize more information and digital assets in the value chain to redefine customer experience, optimize operational processes and develop new business models. The end goal of digital transformation is not revenue -- at least not directly. More important in the short term is customer satisfaction and speed-to-market, which translate eventually into improvements in profitability. How the sale is made is more important than ever.

According to the studies, improving customer experience is more important to businesses than any other factor, including increases in revenue, improving differentiation, and lowering costs. Customer experience also rules in terms of the skill sets that are most desired and sought-after in their senior executives and IT managers. Actually understanding and being able to use key technologies is less important than knowing how to please the customers!

So, while digital transformation is crucial to improving the customer experience, the customer experience is also a critical factor in the digital transformation. Customers interact with the businesses they use via a wide variety of channels and media. Usually, customers interact with a business using multiple channels within a single customer journey. Digital channels are the strongest medium, so naturally those receive the greatest focus.


VoLTE lets the caller make and receive voice calls over LTE networks, something that was impossible before. nGeniusOne helps monitor the VoLTE service to help you provide the highest most consistent voice call quality possible.

In terms of importance, companies rank improving the online customer experience as most important, mastering cross-channel marketing as second most important, and improving the mobile customer experience as third most important. Obviously, numbers two and three are directly connected to number one -- it all comes back to the issue of providing an exceptional customer experience, no matter how, when, or where the customer chooses to interact with the brand and business.

On one side, digital disruption is real, but on the other side service performance and availability are indisputably critical metrics to any industry. NETSCOUT helps maintain on-going value for the customer with its flagship solution, nGeniusONE platform and Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology. To assure customers have a flawless user experience, NETSCOUT delivers data-driven, real-time actionable intelligence and end-to-end operational visibility of the entire IT infrastructure. Smart data from NETSCOUT is based on network traffic and complemented by other sources such as synthetic transactions and NetFlow. As a result, IT teams get timely information to navigate through the digital transformation changes, today and tomorrow.

Does all of this digital transformation and improving the customer experience sound like a tremendous amount of change in a very short span of time? Well, it is. But you don't have to face the Age of the Customer and the digital transformation all alone. You can learn more about what the future holds and how you can get your network ready for it when you download our e-book: Are You Ready for the Next Generation of Network Management?