3 Customer Trends For Application Owners  

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In the past 18 months or so, our lives have been turned upside down. Whether it’s our social interactions, work or shopping habits, we’ve had to reevaluate and redesign our environments to fall in line with the new norms thrust upon us.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) ensured that effective actions were taken quickly by governments and businesses in the region, in the early weeks of the crisis. Almost every change — remote work, distance learning, telemedicine, and a flurry of business-model reengineering was enabled by digital services.

A recent AppDynamics report App Attention Index 2021: Who takes the rap for the app? shows that 98 per cent of UAE consumers (14 per cent higher than the global average) believe digital services have had a positive impact on their lives during the pandemic. As they recognise the benefits such services can bring, it is now clear that much of the change will remain indefinitely. That’s why a significant majority intend to increase their use of applications even more in the upcoming months.

However, this appetite for applications and digital services is not without consequences, and has implications for brands and for the technologists responsible for delivering incredible digital experiences. Consumers say they want the “Total Application Experience”. This refers to applications which are responsive, easy to use, secure, always on, and constantly improving to align with even more demanding user expectations. In the coming year, all brands will face the pressure to meet these demands for flawless customer experience. Let’s take a look at three consumer dynamics that brands will need to consider.

1. Digital Gratitude

The App Attention Index reveals a strong sense of attachment, from customers, towards the brands that supported their needs during the pandemic through digital services. A majority said that applications gave them a sense of control and a feeling of empowerment, acting as a lifeline to normality. And consumers aren’t shy to acknowledge and express gratitude for the efforts behind those digital experiences. Around 85 per cent of UAE respondents said they were grateful to brands that invested in digital to ensure access to the services they most relied on, and 82 per cent (15 per cent higher than the global average) indicated that they now feel more loyal to those brands that went the extra mile to deliver high quality applications.

2. The Blame Game

Given the fact that consumers are now perfectly aware of how a state-of-the-art application should look and work, it’s no surprise that our report found they’re not willing to put up with flawed applications anymore. They rarely ask questions about the source of an outage, a slowdown, or any other deterioration in a digital service. They immediately resort to finger-pointing. In the UAE, 69 per cent of consumers believe the responsibility for flawless, uninterrupted experiences lies solely with the brand.

Of course, if design glitches cause slower page loading or security failures, then consumer dissatisfaction is absolutely justified. But even when the issues are caused by external factors outside the application — such as Internet connectivity, LTE coverage, slow payment gateways or integration issues with third-party plug-ins — consumers will still put the blame on the application owner.

3. First Impressions are Everything

Almost 73 per cent of UAE consumers, a whopping 16 per cent higher than the global average, say they are not prepared to give second chances to brands that disappoint them on the first try. This is, again, hardly a surprising finding, given the volume of choice within reach for consumers. Tolerance for poor digital experience has all but disappeared. And if an alternative brand manages to impress them the first time, then digital-savvy consumers will have no reason to return to the platform that irked them.

Full-stack Observability to Meet Consumer Soaring Expectations

The past 18 months have been fraught with reactive approaches, putting pressure on IT departments that have had to come to terms with their new operating environments and new consumer mindsets and habits. And unfortunately for them, the pressure is not going to relent any time soon. So, in the coming year, they will need to go beyond their existing tools and processes and find new ways to innovate in a consistently high pressure environment.

To respond to the demand for the ‘total application experience’, technologists need unified, real-time visibility into IT performance across their entire IT estate, from the applications themselves to the core infrastructure — full-stack observability. Without this level of comprehensive observability, they don’t stand a chance of being able to rapidly identify and fix performance issues before they impact the end user.

But even when full-stack observability across the entire IT stack is in place, technologists risk being drowned by the never ending amount of IT performance data coming their way. Therefore, it is essential to be able to link them to real-time business metrics. Only with this approach will technologists have the capability to chase down the highest priority issues and flag them for prompt action, to ensure the most business-critical issues are prioritised.

Prepare to be Judged

The habits of consumers in the UAE mirror the world around them. The surging appetite for digital services, while initially a knock-on effect of a global pandemic, is unlikely to reverse itself when the crisis is over. Brands will continue to be judged on their digital experiences. Only the ones with the best tools and insights to meet heightened customer expectations will prevail.

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