We all know the pain and frustration associated with broken software. It’s no secret that the internet is rife with broken links, slow pages, and broken shopping carts, often feeling like it’s being held together with glue and duct tape.

These issues aren’t just causing frustration for customers; it costs businesses millions. According to the Consortium for Information and Software Quality, poor software quality cost US companies $2.08 trillion in 2020.

Every interaction between a customer and your technology is an opportunity to build or destroy trust. People tend to have a poor memory when things go right, but oh boy, do they remember when something broke.

Digital experience matters – consistency is key

McDonald’s is a prime example of a company that has built its business on delivering consistent experiences. No matter where you go in the world, if you order a Big Mac, you can be confident that the burger will taste the same.

Development teams should treat their digital experiences with the same scrutiny. Slow and buggy software doesn’t just impact the customer experience in the short term – it tarnishes their perception of your brand and product, making them significantly less likely to do business with you in the future.

But how can you start delivering the consistent quality that your customers deserve?

Visibility is the first step – You don’t know what you don’t know.

Everyone has errors; they’re part of the development process and are nothing to be ashamed of. Visibility is crucial for any development team who wants to move quickly and cares about delivering a high-quality digital experience for its users.

Even tech giants like Meta have to deal with the pain of software bugs and errors, as shown with their ambitious VR project Horizon Worlds. The difference is that they know the importance of visibility. To give their product the highest chance of success, Meta is getting on top of errors and performance issues early so that when Horizon Worlds is ready to be launched, users can judge the product on its value, not its flaws.

“Currently, feedback from our creators, users, playtesters, and many of us on the team is that the aggregate weight of papercuts, stability issues, and bugs is making it too hard for our community to experience the magic of Horizon. Simply put, for an experience to become delightful and retentive, it must first be usable and well crafted.”

– Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah

Research shows that only 1% of users who encounter a software issue will ever go on to report it. This leads to development teams significantly underestimating the scale of issues, and overestimating the quality of their software. You can’t fix what you can’t see, and a lack of visibility doesn’t mean issues aren’t happening; it simply means you can’t fix them.

By adopting a monitoring solution like Raygun, you can get real-time visibility into the health of your application. Raygun’s suite of digital experience monitoring tools surfaces actionable, customer-centric insights across your entire tech stack. Monitor and improve software quality and performance to deliver fast, error-free experiences that delight your customers and grow your business.

Getting set up is easy. With our lightweight SDKs, you can put in a single line of code and see real-user data flowing in minutes.

“Regardless of what type of product you’re building, Raygun is easy to get started and quickly get real visibility into what your users are actually experiencing.”

– Greg Shackles, Principal Engineer at Olo

How do we ensure we’re not leaving money on the table?

Now that we have visibility, how can we put these insights to use and grow our business? The next step is prioritization. Once you get visibility, you’ll likely be shocked by how many errors are in your software and may wonder where to start.

There are two main things to ask when evaluating what to prioritize. The first is scale – how many users are impacted by a given issue? Tackling the most widespread problems in your software first is generally a good rule of thumb, but you need to also take into account our second factor – severity. Severity accounts for the impact a given issue has on a customer’s experience. An issue in a critical part of your application, such as the shopping cart, should always take priority, and you will need to take action the moment they’re introduced.

With Raygun, you can easily see the scale of an issue by ordering errors according to the number of users impacted. This gives a clear list of improvements to work through. We recommend paying attention to the “Crash Free Users” metric in your account, as it allows you to gauge what percentage of your users are having a good experience.

Using Raygun Alerting alongside custom tagging, you can get alerted to any issues introduced in a crucial area of your website or application, such as the shopping cart. This workflow will help you to quickly identify and resolve the issue before it impacts a significant portion of your users.

Adopting a culture that prioritizes quality

Building an experience that delights customers is one of the fastest and most effective ways to retain customers and grow your business. A customer-centric culture means getting total buy-in from the whole company, putting the customer at the forefront of every decision.

While developers may hold the keys to action improvements, building a customer-centric culture is an everybody activity, with everyone having a unique role to play. Reporting on easy-to-understand metrics like “Crash Free Users” and celebrating improvements together as a team is an excellent step towards building this culture.

‍”Introducing Raygun to the broader Skimmer organization is valuable to me because I expect that my team will operate against the data reported in Raygun to drive how we build software, how we fix the existing software, et cetera. And so, having that ubiquitous language well-known and understood outside of my team is important.”

– David Peden, VP of Engineering at Skimmer

The results

After teams prioritize the customer experience, they quickly see the magic happening. By prioritizing the health of their software, and the customer’s digital experience, businesses are seeing increased customer loyalty, more positive feedback/reviews, decreased support costs, and more significant development resources to focus on more impactful work. You can read the comprehensive Raygun ROI report to see the expected return on investment of prioritizing your customer’s digital experience.

It’s no wonder that thousands of modern development teams have already made the switch to Raygun. Sign up for your free 14-day trial today!