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1. Only bold, high-quality app experiences will survive the attention economy.
Companies now compete in an “attention economy,” where experience is a strategic differentiator. The stakes are high: poor experiences can surface on social media and in app store reviews, impacting revenue through bad brand reputation and higher customer acquisition costs, or through churn, or through missed purchases, subscriptions, and ad impressions.
In 2025, the need to stand out in crowded and competitive marketplaces will shape the landscape of app experiences. Users will demand near-perfect experiences as they increasingly rely on apps for daily shopping, secure financial transactions, and live streaming of sports and entertainment. Every customer interaction will become a make-or-break moment, with the potential for lost customers and revenue if expectations are not met. Delivering on these expectations means finding and fixing the “thousands of little cuts,” not just the big outages. Traditional monitoring tools, like observability, digital experience monitoring, and product analytics tools, often fail on this front, highlighting a growing gap between what tools measure and what users actually experience.
To navigate this challenge, product, engineering, and operations teams will adopt monitoring and analytics solutions that provide an outside-in view of their digital experiences, centered on customers’ perspectives as they progress through user journeys. This approach connects experience and engagement with app performance and system response data, offering a comprehensive, real-time view to address issues as they arise.
2. Product engineering & operations teams will abandon RUM and synthetics as capturing the true user experience becomes possible.
As software becomes ubiquitous and customer demand for differentiated, high-quality experiences grows, product, engineering, and operations teams must understand user engagements at every stage of the digital journey. Teams are abandoning tools that focus on one type of data, such as system performance or user engagement, and are adopting solutions that collect, compute and correlate multiple types of data in real time. This approach provides more accurate insights to inform development priorities and enable companies to meet customer satisfaction and revenue goals.
Currently, to understand user experience and engagement, teams use observability and digital experience monitoring (DEM) solutions with real user monitoring (RUM) capabilities to analyze samples of user experience and synthetic data, establish baselines, and test or emulate user scenarios. In 2025, however, new technologies will enable cost-effective measurement of full-census user experience, spanning thousands to millions of users in real time. This modern approach to DEM will eliminate the need for compromises and provide in-depth understanding of experience from diverse locations. Full-census measurement will provide a complete picture without leaving any customers behind.
3. A.I. combined with full-census, comprehensive client-side telemetry spells the end of sampled session replay.
Session replay is a popular feature in observability and product analytics solutions, capturing a single user’s experience and engagement in an app, including their clicks, taps, and swipes as they navigate the user journey. It is useful for understanding individual behavior and troubleshooting issues. However, its limitations become evident when dealing with many customers with diverse profiles, making the value of the feature questionable.
In 2025, teams will discover a powerful alternative that provides a high-definition view of many customers’ engagement and experience simultaneously. This approach combines AI and full-census, comprehensive client-side telemetry. Full-census telemetry captures all user interactions within apps, across all devices (iOS, Android, and web browsers) at a massive scale, without sampling, in real time. Comprehensive telemetry includes the wealth of insights from modern devices, like smartphones, unifying user engagement and experience data with app performance and system response metrics. Teams will now access solutions that compute experience metrics from full-census, comprehensive client-side data. AI models will then scan millions of customer cohorts to automatically identify common user-impacting issues, providing actionable insights faster and more effectively than individual session replay recordings.
4. A.I. hype will face a reality check as inaccurate, noisy data sources expose cracks in its promise.
In 2025, businesses will demand clearer ROI from the AI vision they were sold in 2023 and 2024. While AI has been praised as a solution to reduce incident response times, cut costs, and streamline operations, many companies find it hasn’t fully delivered on these promises. The emphasis will increasingly be on the importance of clean, comprehensive data as a cornerstone for effective AI deployment. Teams will begin to recognize it’s not just the speed of insights and automation of workloads that define effective AI, but that those insights and automations are based on a comprehensive data source that measures everything that might impact their customers.
For AI to deliver on its promise for personalization, fraud detection, churn prediction, and other valuable analytics use cases, it needs to be based on full-census, comprehensive client-side data that allows deep granularity and drill down into any user cohorts that reflect distinct combinations of devices, third-party services, API calls, ISPs, geographic locations, and other dimensions that might trigger AI-powered alerts. Otherwise, AI tools will continue to surface larger groups of impacted users while failing to identify issues impacting smaller user cohorts. Inadequate AI tools will also lack the depth to pinpoint which components of the digital experience are causing problems for users, such as third-party payment gateways and “Buy Now” button malfunctions.
5. Unifying observability & user analytics will be non-negotiable as demand for differentiated experiences grows and budgets squeeze.
There is growing recognition that siloed tools increase confusion and misalignment amongst product, engineering, and operations teams. This disconnect combined with budgetary pressures heightens demand for unified backend observability and client-side telemetry analytics. With tighter budgets, teams cannot rely on one tool to detect system performance issues and another one to measure user engagement. However, consolidation is not just about cost cutting. If done right, it can generate significant benefits in operational efficiency and improved customer experience.
In 2025, comprehensive measurement of anything impacting user experience will enable teams to identify user-impacting problems faster and get to the root cause before users can turn to social media to express their frustration.
Aiming to get ahead of the competition in 2025?
At Conviva, we foresee that 2025 will be a year of leaving behind outdated technologies (RUM, session replay) for solutions that can effectively handle the scale of modern data, as well as refining approaches to new technologies (AI) to make them deliver actual value for businesses. The emphasis of business operations will turn from performance to experience, as consumers continue to demand flawless digital journeys and punish companies that fail to deliver with decreased revenue and retention.
To differentiate yourself for your users and claim their loyalty in 2025, you need a powerful operational data platform that is built to support and deliver the seamless experiences they expect. This platform needs to capture true user experience, not just for a sample of users, but through comprehensive, full-census telemetry. Its AI capabilities need to be informed by that all-encompassing telemetry, so that AI insights and alerts are actually helpful, rather than just noise.
If this platform sounds like the solution that will set you up for success and differentiate you from your competition in 2025, your business needs Conviva’s Experience-Centric Operations. Talk to us today about how our platform can help you realize your goals for the new year.
