Beyond machine signals: Why observability stacks require human, customer feedback
Companies increasingly rely on sophisticated observability tools that monitor systems in real time, aiming to catch and rectify issues before they impact the end user. It’s unquestionable that machine observability platforms are indispensable for maintaining the technical health of digital services.
However, there's another often overlooked component missing from tech stacks that is just as important as machine signals.
That component is customer feedback, which can be harnessed into real-time actionable insights with a cutting-edge Voice-of-the-Customer platform like unitQ.
According to a PagerDuty study, users of applications often uncover as many, but different, issues as machine signals sent from observability platforms. This means that listening to and taking action based on customer feedback are on equal footing with observability platforms.
This synergy between machine observability and customer feedback is what propels applications to excellence. Machine signals help ensure applications function well while actionable insights from customer feedback drives product quality and innovation to both delight and engage users at every touchpoint of the customer journey.
Here’s a deeper dive:
Limitations of machine observability
Observability platforms play a crucial role in today's tech ecosystem, offering a window into the performance, reliability and health of online services. They are adept at detecting anomalies, tracking performance metrics and signaling system health issues. However, these tools have inherent limitations. They excel at identifying technical problems that can be quantified and measured, like server downtimes, slow response times, and error rates. But machine signals fall short in grasping the full scope of the user experience.
The human element
Users interact with applications in unpredictable, varied and complex ways that are often outside the purview of what observability tools can detect. These interactions can reveal usability issues, design flaws and feature gaps that might not necessarily trigger a metric alert but significantly impact user satisfaction and engagement. Customer feedback becomes the bridge that connects these experiential gaps, offering insights that are as nuanced and varied as the users themselves.
Discovering hidden issues
One of the most compelling reasons to prioritize customer feedback is its ability to uncover hidden issues. Users often encounter and report problems that haven't been flagged by automated systems, simply because these issues don't affect the underlying metrics monitored by observability tools. For instance, a feature might be working as intended from a technical standpoint but could be causing confusion or frustration among users. This kind of qualitative feedback is invaluable for identifying and addressing problems that might not be immediately obvious but can significantly affect the user experience.
Fostering a culture of continuous improvement
Listening to customer feedback isn't just about fixing what's broken; it's about embracing a culture of continuous improvement. Every piece of feedback is an opportunity to enhance the product, making it more user-friendly, feature-rich and aligned with customer needs. By actively engaging with user feedback, companies can adapt their products to meet evolving user expectations, thereby fostering loyalty and encouraging long-term engagement.
Building trust and loyalty
When users see that their feedback is valued and acted upon, it builds trust and loyalty towards the brand. Acknowledging and addressing user concerns demonstrates a commitment to customer satisfaction and shows that the company values user input as part of its decision-making process. This relationship fosters a sense of community and engagement, turning casual users into brand advocates.
Leveraging feedback for innovation
Customer feedback is not just about identifying issues. It's a goldmine for innovation. Users often find bugs, suggest new features, improvements and use cases that the development team might not have considered. By analyzing and integrating this feedback, companies can uncover new opportunities for innovation, stay ahead of market trends and differentiate themselves from competitors.
About unitQ
As the leading Quality Automation platform, unitQ empowers companies with AI-powered, actionable insights from user feedback to help them craft high-quality products, services and experiences. unitQ centralizes feedback from all sources and automatically groups it into thousands of granular categories to help organizations discover what matters most to users — all in real time. Category-leading companies like Spotify, Bumble, Pinterest, Udemy and HelloFresh rely on unitQ to drive growth, reduce churn and build brand loyalty.
With unitQ customer feedback software, including agentQ, organizations can discover quality issues at the same time as their users. Know what product launches, releases or evergreen features are causing the most bugs or support tickets. Drill into the root causes of these issues by source, platform, device, customer segment and more.
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Peter Moberg is Senior Director of Engineering at unitQ
