Consumers run the show on their laptop and mobile devices. A slowpoke webpage or lackluster software application can be history with a single click or swipe. Apps must keep their acts together with rapid iteration and applied data analytics, or hit the recently closed receptacle in a blink.

“We live in a world where the customer attention span is three seconds,” said Sushil Kumar (pictured), senior vice president of product management at CA Inc. “If, within three seconds, you’re page doesn’t load or something they expect doesn’t happen, you lost that customer forever.”

Luckily, loads of consumer data and user-friendly analytic tools abound to keep software and apps performing at peak. However, widely dispersed data — log data, metric data, event data, data from consumer devices — is not easy to sweep into a tidy pile. Conventional methods like dashboard alerting are not well suited to big data collection and analytics, according to Kumar. Instead, a cross-silo view and automated analytics that mine one or two timely nuggets can capture customers’ attention and improve apps with speed.

Kumar explained how to spiff up the customer experience with analytics in an interview at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. He spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Fast times for AppDev

“I cannot think of a better use case for analytics than this whole digital experience management,” Kumar said. To make his point, he offered a real-world example of a CA Technologies customer.

“We had a major broadcast partner who did a mobile app during election time,” he said.

The company wanted to understand customers’ response to engage them more thoroughly. They implemented CA’s application experience analytics services, such as Digital Experience Insights, a software as a service-based monitoring and analytics technology featuring integrated app experience analytics, app performance management and infrastructure management.

“They were able to iterate applications, and within three months, their user retention increased three-fold,” Kumar said. This shows the power of bringing previously siloed data together for a holistic picture of customer response, he added.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: CA Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither CA Technologies nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE