It is safe to say that COVID-19 caught the world off guard. We, as a society and a nation, were not ready for a world characterised by lockdowns and social distancing. And in cases, neither was business – so, we scrambled.

According to the latest Agents of Transformation research from AppDynamics, 88 per cent of Singaporean IT professionals agreed the pandemic had created the biggest technology pressure for their organisation that they had ever seen.

Indeed, this year marked what must be the greatest acceleration of industrial transformation ever, as companies across all sectors migrated in their droves to digital and online environments. A deployment that would typically take place over the course of months, if not years, had suddenly sprung into action in a matter of weeks.

And all in a bid to maintain business continuity and ensure organisations could cope with unprecedented digital demands – from both customers and employees.

Of course, as businesses rushed to transform to maintain their connection with their audiences, so too did that very audience. A recent study by Google, Bain and Temasek suggested that 30 per cent of digital service consumers in Singapore, for example, patrons of e-commerce or people consuming online content – were new to these services.

However, perhaps what is more important to note is that a whopping 91 per cent of these new users said that they planned to continue using at least one digital service post-pandemic. Which stands to reason: are we really all going to go back to the office full-time? Schools? How about ordering our groceries online, and spending an evening at home with our favourite streaming platforms?

Also Read: Is digital transformation now a question of survival? 

The message is clear, consumers are ready to commit to digital, whether it is in their personal life or at work. And this presents businesses with a huge opportunity to engage on a greater scale than ever before. The question is– will they stick with you?

Now that so many people have moved to the online arena, the battleground has become fiercer. There are more options, and new points of comparison to consider. So, businesses will have their work cut out to retain or even capture new audience segments when choices are abundant.

So where are we focusing our attention? Unsurprisingly, after the initial mad dash to digitise, 88 per cent of technologists now agree that the digital consumer experience has become a key priority for their organisation based on the Agents of Transformation 2020 report. For example, how sleek is my app? Does it offer real utility? Can it take the heat?

Performance underpins it all

The challenge, of course, is that performance is tricky to maintain at the best of times – let alone when it is dependent on domains beyond a company’s control. Many IT teams have turned to cloud and multi-cloud environments to enable such swift digital transformation in 2020. This brings benefits, but also challenges.

That is why I would argue that the key to ‘stickiness’ is in building an end-to-end view of the customer’s digital experience – whereby we give technologists the tools to be able to see into and get insights across the entire technology stack.

Because fundamentally, they can no longer focus only on their own existing application environments and infrastructures – they also need to look into their systems and networks in both a public and private setting.

If you do not have full control over your stack, as is increasingly the case these days, performance issues such as public cloud latency are inevitable. But if you can see the issues before they really flare-up, you can take action before it is too late. For example, by re-routing around bottlenecks or optimising workloads so that they can scale.

The pandemic has left us at a crossroads now that the initial panic has subsided, we have a choice ahead. We can continue as we are, in the hope of a return to ‘normalcy’. Or we can accept that many of the changes that have happened are here to stay and take the opportunity to really consider what is needed to future-proof business and pave the way to long-term success.

As both business and consumer reliance on technology continues to increase, being able to rapidly identify and prevent technical disruptions should form part of that plan. It will be key to maintaining customer satisfaction and ultimately driving results – whether that is sales, downloads, or user engagement.

Because let’s face it, if people start to trim away the fat and focus on a few key digital services to keep as we enter the New Year, you can bet your bottom dollar they will be quick to drop anything that fails to give them the best possible user experience.

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