How executives reveal breakthrough insights into customer experiences with Dynatrace to accelerate business growth

When I founded Dynatrace, I aimed to bridge the gap between IT performance and user experience. My goal was to provide IT teams with insights to optimize customer experience by collaborating with business teams, using both business KPIs and IT metrics.

To accomplish this, we traced all digital interactions from device to backend for detailed insights into personalization impacts. Using causal AI, we identified and resolved performance issues automatically. Recently, we’ve expanded our digital experience monitoring to cover the entire customer journey, from conversion to fulfillment.

Shifting to customer-centric IT  

For observability data to be meaningful, it must connect the performance of IT systems to customer experience throughout their journey, across both digital and physical touchpoints. Only then can executives understand whether their software helps to deliver the intended business outcomes.

Dynatrace has been built from the ground up to observe, analyze, and protect customer interactions end-to-end by unifying observability, security, and business data in context. This combination boosts your analytics abilities while also saving costs by consolidating observability, real-time user behavior, and session replay tools within a single platform.

Dynatrace helps executives take the same proactive approach to customer experiences by addressing the following five critical needs:

1. Understand the customer’s business process, including identification of pain points and automation opportunities.
2. Identify where the customer journey can be optimized to improve retention rates.
3. Find ways to boost satisfaction, increase conversions, and accelerate business growth.
4. Automate root-cause and customer impact analysis.
5. Accelerate complaint resolution and establish preventive measures and controls.

Avoid the cost of customer churn by optimizing customer experience

85% of unhappy customers would make the extra effort to go to a company that has better customer service. In 2024, acquiring a new customer costs five to 10 times more than retaining an existing one. Specifically, it can be up to seven times more expensive to attract a new customer compared to keeping one. Additionally, existing customers tend to spend 67% more on average than new customers.

This data speaks to the importance of investing in digital experience and loyalty, which many executives do. However, not many realize the efficiencies they can gain when data from all customer experience processes – observability, customer behavior, and business data – is in a single place, as it is with the Dynatrace Grail data lakehouse. Real-time customer experience remediation identifies and informs the organization about any issues and prevents them in the experience process sooner.

Achieve unparalleled agility and customer satisfaction

As today’s customer experiences span direct access (through web, mobile, and IoT) and indirect access (through APIs, messaging, logistics, and other forms of interactions), customer journeys are omnichannel. This shift highlights the value of observability for a complete and holistic understanding of user journeys. The steps across devices, APIs, server-side service invocations, and information from the inner workings of services can be used to gain a complete understanding of omnichannel user journeys and their associated customer satisfaction and business success.

Dynatrace unifies data from digital and physical touchpoints in a single platform and creates an end-to-end view into the following:

• The performance, reliability, and user experience supported by applications.
• The security, privacy, and regulatory compliance standards of digital services.
• The end-to-end experience for every customer throughout the entire process.

With these insights, you can act on improving the reliability, performance, and user experience of your entire customer journey. This can include live interactions as well as asynchronous interactions across all service touchpoints, whether that’s an order being shipped or a suitcase arriving at the same airport as its owner.

The Dynatrace platform’s granular insights also empower development teams to innovate more effectively so they can deliver faster change, helping executives improve customer experience.

Dynatrace’s advanced digital experience management capabilities, including Session Replay, provide unparalleled visibility into the customer journey. Our customers frequently run team meetings to visually review customer sessions to better understand issues with experiences. Typically, without session replay, if a customer experiences a problem, the IT team logs into an admin account or looks for errors in logs, but often doesn’t find anything wrong. With Session Replay, they can directly replicate what the customer saw and identify the exact problem they are describing. That result can be automatically documented and passed to the development team, providing them with full context of the problem. Session replay sessions are anonymous, having implemented highest standards in the market for privacy management.

User experiences go into many dimensions: business events, dashboards, session replay, synthetic checks which help with performance, reliability, and experience of digital interactions.

A proactive approach to analytics

One of several reasons to observe real user behavior instead of running synthetic tests is that modern applications serve different and individualized content. Personalization, user profiles, pertinent customizations, user permissions, and so forth make almost every web or mobile page unique in their behavior and how they access the backends. Hence, only deep, end-to-end insights can provide the actionable information required to improve experiences and complement common marketing-related analytics tools (e.g. Google or Adobe Analytics).

Analyzing real user behavior with end-to-end context provides value to many use cases, including the following:

• React to issues faster, automate, and quantify the customer impact with the help of Dynatrace AI.
• Optimize business outcomes (revenue/business goals vs. cloud cost and R&D effort) towards inflection points of business goal vs. experience through unified technical, experience, and business data analytics in a single space.
• Improve software delivery by observing customer success on a subset of customers first before going broad (for example, progressive delivery, dark launches, and A/B testing) with Dynatrace support for feature flags and software delivery observability.
• Eliminate finger-pointing as end-to-end visibility connects the data points across departmental needs. Finally, as an executive, you have the means to quickly identify the right team to fix and improve.
• Prioritize investments in new features vs. improvements by better understanding actual customer experiences, utilization, satisfaction, sentiment, and errors. For example, if you have too many rage clicks, you likely want to spend the next sprint on experience improvements vs. new features.
• Automate smarter using actual customer experience metrics, not just server-side data.

All of these use cases go beyond commonly used analytics tools. Dynatrace collects information from the front-end and APIs, backend, and the inner workings of services in full context.

Finally, I hear from executives that while they can leverage Dynatrace to get the best out of their data, they sometimes need additional expertise so that their teams know where to focus and what to act on. This expertise can often come in the form of a Dynatrace partner and our Business Insight team (or both). The Dynatrace Business Insights team are global experts who can help executives get to the platform’s value faster. And by leveraging precise data modeling, the Business Insights team can help executives understand how to strike the balance between optimization of customer experience and investing in new features.