by Kobi Korsah
Happy holidays!
The unprecedented spike in global retail will tail-off in a few days so it's a good moment to draw breath and reflect on the other 350 (or so) days of the year. Falling back to earth with a thud is never fun so it will help us all to remember that a happy customer is for life (not just for christmas). My point is that a company survives only if it has customers, and grows of course by retaining them and attracting new ones; nowhere else is this truer than in retail. For retailers everywhere assuring business demands that you consistently exceed customer expectations - not just during peak trading. This means that if you are able to assure consistently good consumer experiences across multiple channels - anywhere, anytime, and via myriad interfaces you will dramatically reduce risk and enhance the overall revenue-stream. That is why monitoring your customers' actual experiences when they are attempting to access services both online and in-store is a strategic imperative.
As customers interact with progressively sophisticated services they either directly or indirectly reach through increasingly complex web applications and IT sediment and the risk to that experience increases. So managing your customer-facing revenue-generation applications to ensure high levels of performance and availability is equally important. In fact I am perhaps stating the obvious when I say - a comprehensive view of the business impact of poorly performing customer transactions is business-critical. As the emerging "Webopolis" grows exponentially and customers become progressively less loyal, the associated business risk takes on greater significance. Eliminate that risk and you will accelerate growth and enhance your company's reputation - and competitive edge.
Application Performance Management (APM) can help consistently deliver rewarding customer service by proactively minimizing service-availability risks to assure end-to-end customer transactions. Adopting an effective APM strategy across all retail channels is a critical step in managing complex revenue generating applications to deliver a high-quality end-user experience. It will also ensure that the increasingly complex technologies that underpin services across your multiple channels do not themselves pose a business threat. The real benefit of this will be a clear competitive advantage. You can explore this point of view further here www.ca.com/apm.
Kobi Korsah is the Product Marketing Director for CA Wily Technology in EMEA, responsible for the CA Wily Web Application Performance Management solution. Based at CA’s EMEA headquarters in Ditton Park, he is part of the EMEA marketing group reporting to the EMEA Marketing VP. He is a seasoned technology evangelist with three years experience in Application Performance Management (APM). His previous experience with web technologies includes 15 years consulting and advocacy in content/knowledge management and search engines. Before joining CA Kobi spent six years leading technology evangelism for premier content exploitation vendors Hummingbird Inc. and four years with Autonomy plc; he also developed a knowledge management consulting practice for LB Icon. Kobi started his career at Barclays as a management trainee. He holds an HND in Business Information Technology from London Southbank University.