Your Business Is Always On: Is Your Network Visibility?

For a moment, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. They demand instant access to your products and services, and they have little patience for network bottlenecks. Patchy cell coverage, a weak Wi-Fi signal, or congestion at the various “hops” in the cloud—all of these sound like weak excuses for a poor experience, regardless of any underlying complexity. This is the reality that all technology-dependent organizations face today, and it’s one that will only increase tomorrow.

Unfortunately, when customer experience suffers, companies see churn. How large a threat is churn? Salesforce recently found that more than three-quarters of customers would rather switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. In Europe, customer experience is becoming a legal matter. Spain is leading a transformation with its new Customer Service Law, which requires waiting times in contact centers to be no longer than three minutes. For larger companies, a human agent must always be available for customer interactions if someone is not served to their liking by an artificial intelligence (AI) system.

Now ask yourself: what sits at the center of providing a modern customer experience to ensure long-term loyalty? A customer experience that is reliably connected across every channel of communication.

Food, Water, Clothing, Connectivity

The digital age has elevated connectivity to a necessity, making it an essential service like food, water, and clothing. We rely on a digital ecosystem that encompasses and connects education, government services, entertainment, healthcare, and financial services, to name a few. The fundamental need for constant connectivity means that when issues arise, serious consequences are felt immediately:

• Hospitals may delay healthcare procedures due to network outages or congestion, affecting outcomes that have a real impact on patient care.
• Manufacturers and supply chain delivery services may halt operations and deliveries due to outages along the path to consumers.
• Grocery stores may face product shortages if cash registers do not connect to inventory systems to restock shelves in near-real time.
• Transactions can fall through the cracks in financial service networks, damaging customer trust and triggering large potential losses.

These scenarios deliver more than just a financial blow to the organizations and companies we count on. They can have lasting effects on our digital way of life. Expectations of and dependency on connectivity have only grown since the COVID-19 pandemic. This requires a rethinking of the level of visibility needed for the network and IT infrastructure that powers critical systems and services. Just as athletes need in-game analytics to adjust to the very next play, we today need accessible, powerful visibility to act in the moment, ensuring customers have an optimal experience using their digital services.

Practically speaking, what does that mean? Organizations need true, real-time operational data about what is happening across every corner of their application-centric, networked business. And there should be no limit to the ability to scale this visibility when the organization’s infrastructure expands.

Unleashing the Power of Visibility

If your business is interconnected and lives or dies on connectivity, you must have an interconnected view of it. This can present a major challenge to organizations in any industry. They may not have the technical staff on hand to monitor network slowdowns or outages and quickly pinpoint where they are and what is causing them. Or they may just want to ensure that they see a strong return on investment (ROI) from their visibility investments, ideally in the form of always-on connectivity for their customers.

For many organizations, sharing the responsibility for visibility and the connectivity it enables with a service partner makes sense. A partner can provide “as-a-service” visibility features using best-of-breed tools, thus reducing the burden on IT and network operations teams. Getting there may require bringing senior leadership teams together and shifting the culture to a more unified view, but the right partner can help any operation think about total visibility as greater than the sum of its individual parts.

The very definition of connectivity is changing before our eyes, whether it’s the promise of AI-connected services or autonomous cars, but it is all served up through seamless, flawless connectivity. Consumers are sharper than ever and know what good services look and feel like. Today’s digital ecosystems can create tremendous opportunities to reach customers in new ways and deliver services that delight them. Yet failing to observe all the dependencies required to create reliable user experiences can expose any business to dissatisfied customers.

Having a complete view of your digital ecosystem is increasingly pivotal in today’s customer-centric landscape. In fact, organizing around this mindset is quickly becoming critical to organizational and customer success in an ever-advancing, interconnected world.

Discover how NETSCOUT can help you provide a flawless customer experience with NETSCOUT Visibility as a Service.