New Independent Analyst Study Illuminates Organizations' Digital Blind Spot

SAN MATEO, Calif., May 6, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Keynote, the global leader in digital business optimization, today announced the results of a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting that evaluated how digital strategies are supporting customer experience initiatives. Alarmingly, the study found that only 78 percent of respondents in the line of business do not believe their organizations have the digital performance analytics capabilities needed to inform digital strategy now or in the foreseeable future. The commissioned study also found that almost half (45 percent) of organizations had or did not know if they had a digital performance issue over the last 12 months.

As the Forrester study, Mind the Gap: A Study of Digital Strategy and Alignment Between Business and IT, states, "the digital channel is your ubiquitous, public face to the world, and each impression—whether it is the first or fifteenth—is a chance to make or break the customer relationship. … Forrester found that [the companies surveyed for this study] are uniting around customer experience by putting it at the center of their digital strategy, but many are still working to create a comprehensive monitoring and analytics regimen that validates app effectiveness by providing unified insight into business, technology, and customer engagement performance."

The study examined how over 200 line of business (LOB) and IT professionals across organizations with over 1,000 employees in North America and Europe view their digital transformation strategies. In evaluating the factors that will determine the success of digital initiatives over the next 18 months, respondents ranked improving the quality and performance of customer experience as most important (54 percent) followed by expanding the breadth of digital assets (46 percent) and investing in more external digital services to enhance the customer experience (41 percent).

While organizations note the importance of the customer experience as a measure of digital success, they do not recognize the same value of customer experience metrics. In fact, when asked to rank the most important metrics to measure and guide success of digital strategy, respondents listed customer experience metrics as the fifth (responsiveness) and sixth (customer satisfaction or app ratings) most important. The top three most important metrics were viewed as new user growth, average cost per acquired customer and repeat visitors, app users.

The study also found that:

• IT operations teams (63 percent) are most responsible for digital investment decision-making
• Loss of worker productivity (47 percent), loss of revenue (43 percent) and loss of customer loyalty (37 percent) were recognized as the most common consequences of website or mobile app performance issues.
• IT has more access to metrics that guide the success of digital strategies than LOB, including responsiveness (55 percent IT compared to 31 percent LOB), conversion (41 percent IT compared to 26 percent LOB) and repeat visitors, app users (46 percent IT compared to 36 percent LOB).
• Infrastructure or network-related failures (54 percent) were ranked as the most significant contributor to performance issues experienced in the last 12 months.

"The digital transformation mandate is now well known. However, as the study from Forrester reinforces, the success of digital initiatives is wholly dependent on the customer experience," said Aaron Rudger, Director of Product Marketing, Keynote. "Without equal visibility into digital performance, for both IT and line of business, organizations will struggle to meet customer expectations in the new digital norm, and risk losing business to competitors who can."

Download the study, "Mind The Gap: A Study Of Digital Strategy And Alignment Between Business and IT" at: http://www.keynote.com/now/forrester-mind-the-gap

Read our blog to learn more about how IT and the lines of business can unite.

About Keynote
Keynote is the global leader in cloud–based testing, monitoring and analytics for mobile and web, optimizing the value of every digital interaction, enhancing user experience and driving business value through online performance. The company runs the world's largest cloud testing, monitoring and analytics network in the world and collects over 700 million mobile and website performance measurements daily. In 2012 Keynote, a Thoma Bravo portfolio company, was recognized by Forbes Magazine as "One of the Best 100 Companies in America."

Copyright © 2015 Keynote LLC.  Keynote is a trademark of Keynote LLC in the US and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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