Catchpoint’s New Normal Recommendations

The COVID-19 pandemic has been difficult for enterprises. Our CIO New Normal survey shows a litany of issues CIOs are dealing with. We discussed these challenges in our previous blogs here and here. But we also took note of the fact that some enterprises are actually doing quite well.

What can CIOs do to optimize their performance in the post-pandemic “New Normal?” we believe it boils down to addressing two key challenges: Poor customer experience (which can lead to lost customers), and poor employee experience (which lowers morale and productivity).

The issue is that face-to-face customer interactions have been replaced with online interactions. You pick-up immediately on problems when face to face with customers, but many CIOs are blind to signals when the interactions are online.

It’s the same problem with employees, most of whom are now working remotely without in-person IT support. Employees now have to rely on consumer-grade infrastructure, which was never designed to handle enterprise-class apps and high-definition video conferencing. These unreliable systems exacerbate an already stressed workforce’s morale, lowering productivity, and (again) customer dissatisfaction.

Since you are not face-to-face with either your customers or your employees, you need to double down on the effective monitoring of customer and employee experience. This will enable you to spot problems before either your customers or your employees notice.

• Proactive (Synthetic) monitoring lets you simulate the kinds of interactions that customers and employees engage in, from their locations. This identifies problems before they can impact customer and employee experience, and while you still have time to fix the problem.
• Note that top-tier enterprises are 1.5 times as likely to use synthetic monitoring than the bottom-tier.
• Real user monitoring watches what is happening as your employees’ work. It spots real problems happening to real users in real-time. Think of this as your last line of defense.
• IT can proactively engage in fixing problems as they occur. The top-tier is 1.6 times as likely to use real user monitoring than the bottom-tier.
• Employee device monitoring watch your employee’s specific device to make sure it is performing correctly. IT can spot devices that are struggling and work to resolve any issues before your employees get frustrated.
• The top-tier is 1.6 times as likely to use an employee device than the bottom-tier.

These are measures that the best CIOs have employed for years. Now that we’re entering a new phase where interactions with customers and employees have moved to a remote footing, these tools are more important than ever.

Read the complete survey report here