When you think of customer experience, DevOps probably is one of the last things that come to mind. In most businesses, UX planning, business development, sales, and marketing departments are the teams tasked with creating a product that fits the user.

In a recent interview Shridhar Mittal, a longtime proponent of continuous delivery and agile development went against the misconception by stating, “I think the whole promise of DevOps is around better customer experience. Better quality for the customer, but in a much, much faster way than you could do it before. To me, that is ultimate goal.”

A Different Type of Customer Experience

Customer experience isn’t limited to the look and feel of a product. Information technology professionals are essential in the product development process because they’re the ones who make software possible. It used to be that a customer would buy a product, install it on their computer, and apply patches as needed. Today however IT teams are being stretched thin because cloud applications require continuous maintenance. In the era of SaaS, PaaS, and other Cloud systems, the truly successful companies are the ones which have a seamless workflow between developers and system administrators.

Steps You Can Take to Improve the Customer Experience

Below are three core steps you can take to immediately to help your teams handle even the most demanding projects:

1. Improve Team Communication: Having an efficient workflow between teams is essential to keeping your projects moving at a reasonable pace. Inc outlines a few ways to improve this skill, most notably leveraging online tools instead of meetings can boost performance.
2. Set Clear Metrics: Without a clear sense of where your projects are headed, you’ll just be spinning your wheels. Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website load time, resource usage, and deployment success rate, will enable you to determine if you’re keeping pace with customer needs.
3. Create a Culture which fosters Innovation: As discussed in an earlier blog having a solid workplace culture is just as essential as having the right IT infrastructure. Flexibility, communication, and ongoing education are the three key attributes the most successful DevOps teams focus on.

Don’t Spread Resources Thin

In order to provide a quality customer experience, you need to ensure your applications are always up and that your IT budget isn’t drained from unnecessary hardware spending. By using a cloud based monitoring suite such as Site24x7, you can monitor all your infrastructure from a single location. Aside from managing your application performance, you can also use the monitoring tool to determine the right balance of cloud (AWS, Azure, etc.) or traditional servers for your business.