By Bertrandt Delport, Country Host, BT South Africa

Today's customers and employees demand a seamless digital experience. But building an outstanding digital experience that is sustainably repeatable and scalable is no small feat.

In today’s distributed networks and application environments, user-interface problems can occur anywhere: along a long chain, from within the app itself, in transit, or within a third-party plug-in. We have seen first-hand the challenges of doing this especially when looking at our experience with collaboration apps.

That the task of creating a reliable application experience is a complex endeavour matters little to users – they simply want a good experience. It leaves companies little room for error, however, is not impossible to achieve, especially if IT teams have the right cloud-centric network support that can deliver multiple capabilities, as well as a holistic view of the company and visibility at scale.

The burning questions are, what exactly is an ideal digital experience and what role does a network play in supporting a company to achieve this?

From a customer and employee point of view, the first pillar of an outstanding digital interaction is that it is frictionless, simple, rapid, responsive, secure, and effective from start to finish. From the company’s point of view, presenting the user with this simplicity means managing a great deal of complexity behind the scenes.

Network support and reliability are paramount to the overall digital experience. Customers are rapidly moving applications and workloads to the cloud. Legacy network architectures are not well suited to this new way of working – problems include lack of agility and flexibility, long fixed-term contracts, complex inter- and intra-cloud routing, and poor scalability. A network architecture, like that of BT’s recently launched Global Fabric, that gives a company rock-solid high-performance networking coupled with cloud-like flexibility becomes a core enabler of predictable and reliable application performance.

The second pillar is that of personalisation. According to research, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions, and the large majority (76%) get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.

And finally, there must be a balance of offering convenience while retaining data security and compliance, so as to maintain the trust of customers.

Here are three steps that companies can take to achieve this:

1. Set up monitoring for accurate insight

Understand how users experience your app from where they are and how the underlying network, cloud provider, or Internet connection impacts their interaction and focus on maintaining high availability by investing in a cloud-centric core network, built for a multi-cloud world.

2. Deploy an app performance management solution

Choose an enterprise-grade Application Performance Monitoring (APM) platform to understand clearly how users interact with your company while giving your technology teams visibility into every line of code to quickly find the root cause of issues and resolve them.

3. Bring these solutions together to support business outcomes

Incorporate these solutions along with the data and insights they generate into your overall performance review, so your digital user experience programme aligns with your wider business objectives and teams can innovate at pace.

Creating an outstanding user experience is an important business differentiator, enabling companies to gain more customers and retain existing ones.