The smartphones, laptops and tablets (and even the TV) in my home carry the same distinctive logo, making it feel like I’m in an Apple store at times. Although I’m not only one having a love affair with the company according the industry research. Apple is rated as one of the brands with the most loyal customers, along with Amazon, Nike, Dunkin’ Donuts, Coors and Hyundai.

Consumers judge brands based on much more than just their personality and price points; the performance of their products, services and people are major influencers.

That performance is delivered over their network, which is the most important delivery mechanism for a brand. Thus, their network monitoring software should be considered just as important to confidently assure the customer experience so critical to brand loyalty.

The complexity challenge

To maximize customer loyalty in today’s digital age, organizations don’t just need to invest in R&D, marketing materials and support services; they need to invest in their network monitoring software.

Mobile apps, online communities and websites have become the ‘shop front’ for today’s consumers, and businesses need to ensure they have a unified experience across every channel. That means ensuring that every networking component (physical, virtual or logical) supporting every channel is available 24×7. This is where the challenge really starts.

Modern networks supporting today’s application economy are more complex than ever before. Workloads are moving to the cloud creating network visibility gaps. Components are virtualized creating more layers to monitor. And architectures are software-designed with changes happening faster than network operations can keep up with. All of these innovations and improvements in network infrastructures will create monitoring and management headaches.

Effective network monitoring software: hide and seek

By transforming to a modern network monitoring software approach and introducing analytics capabilities, businesses can discover these hidden corners – and hidden performance problems. Deploying an agile and scalable network operations platform allows organizations to combine operational intelligence and predictive analytics with modern network monitoring software to bridge the gap between machine logs and application performance.

By embracing a big data platform with full stack network analytics, network operations teams can turn inventory, topology, device metrics, faults, flow and packet analysis into actionable intelligence that enables confidently delivering the company brand and improving customer sentiment.

Finding loyalty through stable networks

Knowing a single network component is performing at an optimal level is no longer enough in our inter-connected world. Consider that IT and business stakeholders need to be able to track the health of the entire traditional and modern network stack and correlate this with the customer experience around the globe.

Making the link between network operations and customer experience is essential and allows businesses to safeguard both brand loyalty and competitive advantage. After all, more loyal customers make more repeat purchases.

Jeremy Rossbach is senior product manager for Enterprise Management at CA Technologies