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It’ s no secret that retailers have been able to capitalize on the rapid success of e-commerce and enhance their omnichannel strategies to meet growing customer demands. However, this digital evolution, as beneficial as it is, also creates new operational challenges.
Today’ s consumers expect seamless shopping experiences, whether browsing a mobile app, checking in-store stock availability, or placing an order for home delivery. Operational disruptions, such as slow web pages, payment failures or security incidents, can cause a poor experience, with the potential to irreversibly damage customer loyalty, brand reputation and ultimately impact revenue.
While many retailers already use observability to manage system performance and understand the root cause of problems, observability data can provide even more opportunities to solve challenges beyond traditional application and infrastructure monitoring.
Retail generates vast amounts of data from digital interactions, but without clear visibility into how IT issues affect business outcomes, it can be difficult to identify areas for improvement. You can bridge this gap by linking the insights captured through observability data on the performance of systems with business analytics practices. This provides teams with a deeper understanding of how IT performance influences key metrics – such as conversions, revenues, and customer retention – so they can focus on the issues that have the greatest business impact.
For example, a one-second slowdown at the beginning of the customer journey, which caused a 50 % drop in conversions in the last 24 hours, is much more critical than a seemingly larger problem at the end of the process, which resulted in a drop of only 10 %. By taking a unified approach to business observability and analytics, retailers can empower their teams to make these distinctions in real-time, gaining deeper context to understand what happens and ensure high-priority fixes are addressed first.
It’ s worth noting that with customer expectations higher than ever, merchants need to shift to a proactive service model. By anticipating and addressing complications before they arise, you can mitigate their impact on the customer experience. For example, observability-driven insights can identify that an API slowdown prevents inventory updates from displaying correctly. This needs to be addressed quickly, as it can
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