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It can be a customer, partner, or even employee. “End user” is a broad term that has slightly different meanings in the context of software, hardware, handheld, Internet or other computing solutions. Note that the terms “end user” and “user” are often used interchangeably although “user” is a broader term and “end user” is exclusively used in the context of information technology.
A best practice in application development and support is to understand performance from the point of view of the end user, otherwise known as end user experience monitoring. End user experience monitoring can be either synthetic monitoring (scripts that are executed at regular intervals and behave like a user interacting with the application) or real user monitoring (capturing of real user behavior and performance metrics). Both are often used together: synthetic monitoring to provide an early warning or insight during testing or in production environments and real-user monitoring to gain real-time insight into user behavior.
Nearly one third of the time, IT learns about application problems because their end users contact support, according to Forrester Reports. This reactive mode can be costly for organizations since 89% of customers do not return after a poor experience. Ignoring what an end user is experiencing can lead to unnecessary turnover and high customer acquisition costs.
Watch the video: Excellent End User Experience is Like the Perfect Cup of Coffee
There are several considerations when selecting an end user experience monitoring tool. Does it offer real end user monitoring for all the applications and devices used by your employees? Can you correlate application activity, user activity and device performance to identify the root cause of problems? And, can you baseline performance and get alerted to problems when they occur on any of the devices used?
Before you select a vendor, it’s also important to consider deployment options, especially if your company has a cloud-first strategy in place. Many vendors provide both on premises and cloud deployment options so that you have the flexibility to deploy their solutions per your preference.
Riverbed SteelCentral Aternity automatically monitors and correlates together the three streams of data that constitute true user experience – user interactions, device health and performance, and application performance, as seen by the end user. It can be deployed on premises or as a cloud solution.
“The Travis Perkins Group is in better shape today because we now have real insight from SteelCentral Aternity – we know exactly what our colleagues’ experience is like, out in branch and store, and we can invest our time and energy where it really matters for them to enable a positive experience for our customers.” – Matt Greaves, Technology Director, Travis Perkins plc. Read the full testimonial >
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