New Relic’s Bruno Teuber has seen scores of digital businesses come and go. He speaks to GrowthBusiness on what success looks like for digital businesses, and how every growing business can scale up like tech start-ups with the right strategies and metrics in place.
Digital businesses can stand the test of time
In today’s always on, multi-channel world, it is universally acknowledged that the customer is king. Some of the world’s most successful businesses, which started out as start-ups just a few years ago (Airbnb, Deliveroo, Uber and Netflix to name a few) have answered the shifting ‘customer’ mindset by providing easy, readily available services in a just-in-time or subscription-based model. The lesson is that to truly stand the test of time, companies and their brands must find new and innovative ways to engage meaningfully with their customers through all of their digital channels, all of the time.
As a result, companies of every size and in every sector are rightfully making significant investments in their digital strategies. Knowing how their websites and apps are performing, what their customers are experiencing, and what the impact is on their bottom line is therefore of paramount importance to ensuring their business is a roaring success.
Every company is a software company today
If you think about it, there isn’t a single industry that hasn’t been impacted by, and benefited from, the internet. And behind every website and app is software. This in turn means it’s imperative that this software is monitored, optimised and ultimately working well all of the time. Software – because it is the foundation to everything internet-based and digitally-focused – has quite literally become the bedrock on which every company is built today.
In all of our customer examples, and with every company we work with, our customers use our tools to see inside their software to monitor, review, assess, optimise and analyse it.
Costa Coffee is a classic feature of the British high street with over 2,000 retail locations. The company wanted to mirror its customers’ positive in-store experience with that experienced on its website and with their mobile app. The retailer turned to us to help provide detailed data and analysis on its application performance and help Costa proactively search for – and avoid – potential performance issues.
Like other traditional booksellers, Waterstones faced the challenge of re-connecting and re-engaging with a customer base that had moved online. To meet this challenge, the head of web development, Oliver White, subscribed to New Relic’s 14 day free trial to find out if monitoring tools could help. After this successful introduction, New Relic has worked with Waterstones to help them re-invent the way they engage with customers, ensuring that user experience across the app and website are as seamless as possible. Our monitoring tools enable Waterstones to consolidate user experience and user behaviour data to enable them to adapt, improve and troubleshoot any problems that may arise.
Trainline is a purely online player. This means that optimised web and applications performance and overall usability (given the limited time frame for buying train tickets) is absolutely paramount. Given the nature of the business, Trainline implemented New Relic’s products to help it track everything from financial performance to optimising their site performance and improving customer experience.
Successful websites power successful businesses
From a sales and marketing perspective, it’s clear that a successful website will provide credible, original content and valuable, timely information, tailored to the audience. And of course it should be easy to read and pleasing to the eye. But behind the scenes, more technical elements are critical too.
For starters, a seamless user experience is an absolute must. All companies need to continually put the customer first, and make sure they continually monitor and enhance their site’s performance based on insight around customer experience.
Using agile methodology is also clearly a big benefit to ensuring that changes, upgrades or fixes can happen rapidly, frequently, and reliably. Running customer surveys and then using those metrics to adapt and adjust is also sensible.
Our digital intelligence platform enables our customers to quite literally ‘geek out’ on a wealth of in-depth info – from their application performance, to their customer experience, to their whole business – and this level of insight is immensely useful to running a successful website.
