The “cloud mandate” imposed by the COVID pandemic has a downside, as well as a benefit. Global digital interaction increased from 36% in 2019 to 58% in 2020, but with a choice of buying options just a click away, impatient consumers are demanding companies perform on their terms, when and how they want it.

“If I need Tide right now to do my laundry, I need it right now,” said Manjula Talreja (pictured), senior vice president and chief customer officer at PagerDuty Inc. “So I go to a Costco website to order so that it can get delivered in the next hour. [But] if there’s even a second glitch, I’ll swap over to Amazon or I’ll swap over to Target. That’s what’s happening in the real world, whether it’s B2C or it’s B2B.”

Talreja spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Lisa Martin at PagerDuty Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how digital businesses have to be instantly able to respond to any situation and how PagerDuty is providing solutions to do so. (* Disclosure below.)

PagerDuty incident-response platform streamlines real-time ops

Consumer impatience spills over from the customer experience to the employee. Frustrated with outdated work systems that don’t meet the standards they see in their personal lives, workers will seek out new positions, just as customers turn to a competitor when a webpage fails to load, Talreja pointed out.

This combination of the tech skills gap, a continuing great resignation, and the increased expectations of customers are creating a triple threat in an environment where businesses have to be ready to respond to anything, instantly. Responding reactively – after the customer has posted a negative rant on social media – is not good enough. Companies have to be able to be proactive and anticipate problems before they occur, according to Talreja. This is where real-time operations and incident-response platform PagerDuty can help, she added.

“PagerDuty is at the heart of making every second matter. And every second is equal to money,” she said.

As well as providing companies with the ability to automate tasks to smooth the employee experience and increase application performance, the PagerDuty platform has access to customer data from thousands of companies, allowing it to identify specific benchmarks and inform customers exactly how their performance matches with their industry peers.

“We’ll use customer data to really understand what is best in class on uptime; what is the best in class to reduce noise during alerts; what is best in class for customer service operations,” Talreja said. “We can benchmark what’s happening in the financial services industry. What’s happening in the technology industry. What’s happening in the retail industry. Our customers love that.”

The statistics back up the validity of PagerDuty’s recommendations, with return on investment ranging from 300 to 900% within a couple of months, according to Talreja.

“Think about if 30% of your organization focuses just on innovation and product development versus on an incident, and the work-life balance, the quality of life, increases the retention of the employees. Yet the company is only driving their growth,” she stated. “That is why our customers love us. That is why our renewal rates are greater than 95%.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of PagerDuty Summit:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for PagerDuty Summit. Neither PagerDuty Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE