Navigating the stormy seas with an observability compass

India is the world’s second-largest telecommunications market, and over the next five years, the completion of the 5G rollout, rise in mobile phone penetration and decline in the cost of data will contribute to the addition of 500 million new Internet users in the country, creating opportunities for old and new players alike.

Along with a growing number of users, the ways we as a country work, live, and communicate are also undergoing large-scale changes that are redefining customer expectations for the industry. Rapid digital advancements are causing systematic changes to products and the broader ecosystem. For instance, the expansion of 5G technology is dramatically expanding and improving connectivity.

In a convenience-driven market like India, consumers expect to engage with telco providers seamlessly via their mobile devices. This mobile-first expectation requires organisations to provide an optimal digital customer experience and seamless connectivity.

Roadblocks to Delivering the Best CX

Delivering the best possible customer experiences is crucial to a successful business. In India, a lack of personalisation and localisation in online content is one roadblock to creating these experiences. According to the State of Observability for IT and Telco report, technology and telecommunications organisations had high-business-impact outages at a higher frequency than other business types, with 37% indicating that they experienced these outages at least once a week.

When it comes to outages, the stakes are high for telecommunications providers in particular. If a website goes down or services are interrupted, it could cost millions of dollars and negatively influence brand perception. Billions of dollars in consumer and business spending are now being driven through digital channels, making it vital for telcos to accelerate their speed to market, improve uptime and reliability, implement the best digital customer experience strategies, and create seamless engagement with end users.

Observability for Digital

Customer Experience

One major issue that telcos in India face is frequent call dropouts and poor signal quality, which are a direct result of not having the right observability tools in place. The combination of Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) and observability can track and optimise performance and reliability to deliver exceptional online customer experiences.

This is especially important for critical infrastructure industries like telecommunications, which rely on providing vital customer-facing services. Intelligent observability tools powered by DEM enable real user monitoring, browser monitoring, mobile monitoring, and synthetic monitoring. Additionally, many DEM tools offer session replay, which uses video-style playbacks of actual user sessions to identify issues down to the code level.

The real-time insights created through observability are central to reducing downtime and firefighting. One area where this has been particularly helpful is when dealing with poor Internet quality and signal strength.

Digital Experience Monitoring tools offer session replay, which uses video-style playbacks of actual user sessions to identify issues down  to the code level.

In India, cell tower coverage is not always comprehensive, which means that an up-and-down effect is created when tower loads increase. This can lead to a frustratingly slow Internet connection for customers who expect a high level of service.

Observability can quickly identify the cause of problems and improve the customer experience while creating a clear view of the interdependencies within the IT ecosystem. It can highlight where failures are happening and indicate their impact on other system components. Telcos that achieve full-stack observability benefit from improvements to mean time to resolve, or MTTR, mainly due to the increased visibility this technology provides.

Recent research by New Relic indicates that telco and IT companies have achieved a median annual Return on Investments (ROI) of 114% using these tools. This is higher than that of those without a full-stack observability practice. More interestingly, organisations with mature observability practices achieved an annual median ROI of 250%.

Coupled with observability, a fully integrated, AI-powered DEM solution empowers businesses to monitor, analyse, and optimise customer experiences across all digital touchpoints. Companies can gain critical insights and proactively eliminate user experience interruptions before they occur.

The emergence of Artificial Intelligence, 5G, edge computing, and other technologies is greatly impacting telcos, contributing to the creation of large amounts of data that can dwell in silos. Adding to the challenges are rising consumer expectations for a reliable, mobile-first experience, high levels of industry regulation, and user privacy requirements under the government’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act.

The mobile-first expectation requires organisations to provide an optimal digital customer experience and seamless connectivity.

Successfully committing to delivering seamless digital experiences can enable telcos to improve brand reputation and user retention. To prevent outages from occurring, telcos must lean into observability. This will allow them to fix what is broken with their systems and improve the customer experience and their bottom line.

By Rohit Ramanand

The author is the GVP of Engineering at New Relic.

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