By Prasad Rai, VP Sales, India, New Relic
Digital payments have revolutionised Indian consumer buying behaviour. With the widespread adoption of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) across small and large businesses, digital payments are emerging as a driving force behind the country’s consumer economy. However, Indian customers have their concerns – especially when they buy products and pay digitally. Many are worried about issues including payment failure and problems processing refunds, the New Relic State of Ecommerce in India report found. When customers perceive that brands fail to meet their expectations, they shift to doing business with competitors. This emphasises why online retailers must ensure that the digital payment experience is seamless and promptly address customer requirements.
Creating consumer trust
Ecommerce companies aiming to foster customer loyalty must break free from the constraints of traditional operations and adopt modern business practices. Such an approach will be the cornerstone of industry powerhouses in the years to come, and help drive consumer trust and loyalty.
The status quo of traditional institutions operating 50 years ago cannot be applied to modern digital organisations. Ecommerce user journeys and customer touch points are lightyears ahead of a traditional brick and mortar establishment, and their strategies must reflect this.
If a business identifies that the majority of errors are being reported by customers via digital payments integrations, DevOps teams will need to spend a significant amount of time looking for the root cause of an issue before they can begin fixing it. All-in-one observability helps organisations identify errors before they reach customers, and can help businesses take a more proactive approach to building customer trust.
Prioritising seamless customer experiences
The New Relic State of Ecommerce in India report found that a vast majority (72%) of Indian consumers say they most often use mobile apps for online purchases. With a rise in online shopping, customers demand exceptional digital experiences which means that mobile apps and websites need to keep up with user expectations. With the proliferation of many digital alternatives, customers will simply stop using an app if there is frequent downtime, payment failures, excessive error messages, or timeouts. In fact, 60% of Indian consumers wouldn’t stay on an app if buffering continued for more than 10 seconds.
Moving from monitoring to observability
Achieving agility in customer experiences requires a transition from monitoring to observability. While traditional monitoring merely evaluates the statistics of known metrics, all-in-one observability helps teams to identify the root cause of the failure quickly. Traditional monitoring traces a customer complaint about the failure of an online payment from initiation to mid-processing, fraud check to clearance. Only after these measures are taken will the online payment be completed. It vastly curbs the ability for technology teams to resolve customer pain points quickly, as a payment failure alert can only be triggered without providing the full context of what’s actually gone wrong.
Full-stack observability aggregates all technology, including user actions, code execution records, resource utilisation, networks, service interfaces, APIs, browser response, security, and other important system behaviours. It creates the right context for engineers to find problems and fix them quickly. Additionally, observability can identify the hidden causes of disruptions by collecting the right system insights and achieves comprehensive, correlative, and collective instrumentation of monitoring, metrics, events, traces, and logs.
With the visibility that observability brings, engineering teams in charge of managing the tech stack of an ecommerce business can isolate and tackle performance issues faster, resulting in enhanced productivity and reduced operational costs.
Observability allows teams to better collaborate in their efforts to optimise digital experiences for customers while providing ecommerce businesses with a competitive advantage. Adopting an all-in-one observability platform will allow online retailers to deliver exceptional customer experiences while enhancing customer trust.