In today’s hyper-connected digital landscape, where customer expectations soar higher with each interaction, the difference between business success and failure often comes down to milliseconds. In fact, single application glitch, a momentary website slowdown, or an unexpected system interruption can cascade into millions in lost revenue and irreparable damage to customer trust. This is where the art and science of observability becomes not just a technical necessity, but a strategic imperative that separates industry leaders from those left behind.
Welcome to CXQuest
Welcome to CX Quest, where we explore the frontiers of customer experience innovation with the visionaries who are reshaping how businesses connect with their customers. Today, we’re privileged to dive deep into the world of intelligent observability with a leader who has, in fact, spent over two decades at the intersection of technology and customer success.
Let’s Welcome Pradeep Seshadri
Pradeep Seshadri brings a unique perspective to the observability conversation, having witnessed firsthand the evolution of enterprise technology across some of the world’s most influential companies. From the early days of traditional monitoring to today’s AI-powered predictive platforms, he has been instrumental in helping organizations transform their approach to digital experience management. His journey through industry giants like Commvault, Dell Technologies, and NetApp has, in fact, equipped him with invaluable insights into what truly drives customer adoption and business value in the observability space.
Leapfrogging Businesses
Currently serving as the Director of Solutions Consulting for India & South Asia at New Relic, Pradeep Seshadri oversees one of the world’s most dynamic and rapidly growing technology markets. In a region where digital transformation is accelerating at unprecedented speed, and where businesses are leapfrogging traditional infrastructure to embrace cloud-native architectures, his role extends far beyond traditional pre-sales consulting. He’s architecting the future of how enterprises across diverse industries—from fintech startups in Bangalore to manufacturing giants in Mumbai—approach digital reliability and customer experience optimization.
Predictive Problem Solving
What makes this conversation particularly compelling is the timing. We’re at an inflection point where artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how we understand and respond to digital performance issues. The shift from reactive monitoring to predictive observability represents one of the most significant paradigm changes in enterprise technology in decades. Pradeep Seshadri has been at the forefront of this transformation, helping organizations move beyond the traditional “break-fix” model to embrace what New Relic calls “predictive problem solving”—where issues are identified and resolved before they impact customers.
Unique Challenges
The India and South Asia market presents unique challenges and opportunities that make this regional perspective invaluable. With its diverse technological landscape, ranging from legacy systems in traditional enterprises to cutting-edge cloud architectures in digital-first companies, the region serves as a microcosm of global digital transformation trends. Success in this market requires not just technical expertise, but deep cultural understanding and the ability to navigate complex organizational structures while driving measurable business outcomes.
Reshaping CX Strategies
Throughout our conversation today, we’ll explore how intelligent observability is reshaping customer experience strategies, dive into the practical challenges of implementing observability at scale, and uncover the emerging trends that will define the next generation of digital experience management. We’ll also examine how businesses can leverage AI-strengthened platforms to not just solve problems faster, but to prevent them entirely—transforming IT from a cost center into a strategic growth driver.
Opening & Background
Q1. Pradeep, you’ve had an incredible journey spanning over two decades in technical pre-sales and enterprise technology. Can you walk us through how your perspective on customer experience has evolved from your early days at companies like NetApp and Dell to your current role at New Relic?
PS: “Customer Experience” (CX) is crucial for fostering customer loyalty and building a sustainable competitive advantage. Great CX hinges on a product or service that consistently delivers on its promises, coupled with responsive support, continuous innovation, and clear value realisation.
Over the past few decades, the requirements for CX have drastically evolved. “Moments of Truth” for customers have transformed, becoming more real-time, continuously available, and involving an exponentially increasing number of digital touchpoints. Until recently, businesses had the luxury of gradually building and improving CX. Fast forward to today in sectors like quick commerce, OTT, and ride sharing that serve vast and demanding customer bases, and we see a new standard for customer experience has emerged. This new normal applies to both these agile companies and the more established, traditional players in their industries. Consequently, CX has become critical to the success and survival of all digital businesses.
The Observability Space
Q2. What initially drew you to the observability space, and how did you recognize its potential to transform customer experience management?
PS: I embarked on my journey into observability over three years ago when I joined New Relic. With two decades in infrastructure solutions, I sought a new, impactful technological domain. Observability stood out as a clear career progression due to its enduring relevance.
The past 15 years have seen significant investments in digital transformation across various industries. A crucial element unifying these diverse businesses is observability, which has proven to be a formidable force in driving groundbreaking improvements in customer experience (CX). Customers today have high expectations. Proactively identifying and rectifying potentially suboptimal experiences before a customer encounters them is paramount for revenue growth, retention, and company reputation. This is exactly what intelligent observability does.
The Observability Revolution
Q3. How do you explain “intelligent observability” and why it’s become so critical for modern customer experience?
PS: Intelligent observability uses the power of AI to monitor how a system is performing by analysing the data it produces in real time. It provides visibility across the full tech stack—whether it’s the front end, back end, infrastructure, security posture, or logs.
What makes intelligent observability different is that it goes beyond traditional MELT datasets (metrics, events, logs, and traces). It brings context into the picture by analysing system behaviour in relation to business impact. This allows teams to not only detect problems early, but also predict and prevent them before they escalate. It also addresses a major challenge most organisations face today—siloed teams, tools, and data. Intelligent observability breaks down those barriers by offering a unified view across systems, enabling better collaboration and faster decision making.
Why Intelligent Observability?
Intelligent observability has never been more important than it is today. Customers have countless options and zero tolerance for friction. Intelligent observability helps businesses deliver seamless, reliable experiences across multiple touchpoints. In doing so, it helps to build trust, reduces churn, and strengthens long-term relationships with customers.
Q4. New Relic positions itself as moving organizations “past proactive to predictive.” Can you share a real-world example of how this shift has transformed a customer’s business outcomes?
PS: Let’s take the example of one of our customers, Darwinbox, a leading human resources (HR) technology platform. Delivering exceptional customer experiences has always been a priority for them, however in the early stages, their monitoring setup relied on a mix of open-source tools. This led to fragmented insights, slower resolution times, and the need for planned downtime that lasted anywhere from four up to 24 hours. After adopting New Relic, that changed. They gained a single platform for application performance monitoring (APM), logs, infrastructure, and browser monitoring.
99.99% Uptime
This provided end-to-end visibility into their systems, allowing the team to respond to incidents faster, tune performance proactively, and manage peak loads more efficiently, which is essential to ensuring reliability. Subsequently, Darwinbox moved from scheduled hours of downtime to achieving 99.99% uptime. They also reduced outages by 20% and brought down mean time to resolve (MTTR) by 40%. With better system stability and faster issue resolution, they were able to deliver more consistent user experiences and stay aligned with their customer-first approach
Q5. What’s the biggest misconception you encounter when organizations first approach observability, and how do you help them reframe their thinking?
PS: A common misconception I encounter is the perception that observability is a “want” rather than a fundamental “need” for businesses to thrive. Continuous access to timely, accurate, and contextual insights is mission critical for businesses as they empower businesses to make informed decisions backed by real data. Errors, especially in CX, can be extraordinarily costly, inflicting significant financial and reputational damage. The business advantages gained through a comprehensive observability solution render the initial investment almost inconsequential.
Regional Market Insights
Q6. What unique challenges do businesses in this region face when implementing observability solutions, and how has New Relic addressed these?
PS: One of the biggest challenges businesses in India face when implementing observability is tool sprawl. More than half (57%) of organisations use five or more tools for monitoring and 3% use ten or more. This fragmentation results in siloed telemetry data, making it difficult to gain a unified view of system performance. It also creates confusion and alert fatigue; slowing down incident response times and leaving teams unable to act quickly or collaboratively.
This is especially concerning in a region like India, where outages are both frequent and costly. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of Indian businesses reported experiencing high-impact outages at least once a week. For many, the cost of critical app downtime exceeds $1 million.
Success Stories
New Relic is the only AI-driven platform to unify and pair telemetry data to provide clarity over the entire digital estate. This way, teams can detect anomalies early, reduce downtime, and collaborate more effectively. It also helps reduce the cost and complexity of using multiple tools while supporting a proactive and increasingly predictive approach to system performance and reliability.
Q7. Can you share some success stories from the region where observability directly improved customer experience metrics?
PS: Swiggy, one of India’s largest food delivery platforms, relies on observability to stay ahead during peak periods such as Diwali and major sporting events, when traffic can spike by 20–30%. With New Relic, Swiggy uses historical data to predict expected load, plan scaling, and proactively detect potential error patterns. This has enabled them to handle up to 100% of projected traffic during high-stress windows, without service degradation or customer experience issues.
Capillary Technologies, a leading omnichannel loyalty and customer engagement platform serving over 400 enterprises, has seen significant operational gains through observability. Before New Relic, their teams had to switch between multiple tools to identify and troubleshoot issues, often taking close to an hour to resolve incidents. By consolidating telemetry data onto a single platform, Capillary reduced troubleshooting time by up to 80%, cutting issue resolution down to just 10 minutes in some cases. This has improved service reliability, reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR), and strengthened customer satisfaction.
Technology and Innovation
Q8. AI plays a central role in New Relic’s platform. How is artificial intelligence changing the observability landscape, and what should CX leaders know about these capabilities?
PS: AI is at the heart of the New Relic intelligent observability platform. It collects and analyses all telemetry data across applications, infrastructure, and logs, and uses it to surface the right insights at the right time. This allows teams to predict and prevent business-impacting issues before they escalate.
New Relic comes with the ability to integrate observability data directly into existing business workflows through AI agent-to-agent communication. New Relic’s AI agents can interact with other AI agents in IT Service Management, the Software Development Lifecycle, or customer support platforms. This helps teams automate complex tasks and prioritise incidents based on business impact. For example, for integrations with tools like ServiceNow, New Relic brings observability insights directly into more workstreams, including customer support, which helps teams resolve tickets faster and with greater context.
Real-Time Visibility
And New Relic is not just for engineers. By embedding observability into critical workflows, New Relic enables real-time visibility across the entire organisation. For example, CX leaders can access observability insights through plain language prompts that are available in over 50 languages. Everyone stays on the same page, whether it’s identifying anomalies, tracing root causes, or understanding how system performance impacts customer experience.
Looking Forward
Q9. Where do you see the intersection of observability and customer experience heading in the next five years?
PS: CX and observability will be fundamentally intertwined, with shared metrics to gauge their combined effectiveness. CX ratings, whether positive or negative, will directly reflect the optimal or under-utilisation of observability in the coming years.
Q10. As we wrap up, what’s the one key message you’d want every CX leader to take away about the role of observability in delivering exceptional digital experiences?
PS: To continuously improve the systems and services you build by using and interacting with them as a customer would, while leveraging observability for insights. By doing this, you’ll have more empathy for the entire consumer journey, and uncover potential enhancement opportunities that will delight your customers and ensure their loyalty is secured.
Closing
As we conclude today’s fascinating exploration into the world of intelligent observability with Pradeep Seshadri, it’s clear that we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how organizations approach customer experience management. The insights shared today illuminate not just the technical evolution of monitoring and observability, but the strategic transformation that occurs when businesses move from reactive problem-solving to predictive experience optimization.
Pradeep’s journey through the technology landscape—from traditional infrastructure management to today’s AI-powered observability platforms—mirrors the broader digital transformation that countless organizations are navigating. His perspective on the India and South Asia market provides a compelling glimpse into how diverse technological ecosystems are embracing observability as a competitive differentiator. The examples shared today, from fintech innovations to manufacturing excellence, demonstrate that observability isn’t just an IT initiative—it’s a business strategy that directly impacts customer satisfaction, revenue growth, and market positioning.
Democratization of Observability Insights
One of the most striking themes from our conversation is the democratization of observability insights. As Pradeep highlighted, the most successful organizations are those that break down silos between IT operations, development teams, and customer experience professionals. The traditional model where technical metrics remained isolated in operations centers is giving way to a more holistic approach where customer experience indicators, application performance data, and business metrics converge into actionable intelligence.
The shift from reactive to predictive observability that Pradeep described represents more than just a technological upgrade—it’s a mindset transformation. Organizations that embrace this approach aren’t just fixing problems faster; they’re preventing customer-impacting issues entirely. This proactive stance becomes particularly powerful when we consider the multiplier effect of digital experiences. In today’s interconnected world, a single performance issue can ripple across multiple touchpoints, affecting not just individual transactions but entire customer journeys.
Future of Customer Experience Management
Looking ahead, the trends Pradeep outlined paint an exciting picture of the future of customer experience management. The integration of artificial intelligence into observability platforms is creating unprecedented opportunities for businesses to understand and optimize their digital experiences. As these AI capabilities mature, we can expect to see even more sophisticated predictive models that can anticipate customer behavior patterns, identify potential experience gaps before they manifest, and automatically optimize performance based on real-time customer feedback.
The cost optimization aspects of modern observability that we discussed are particularly relevant as organizations balance digital ambitions with economic realities. The ability to “process the right data at the right time,” as New Relic phrases it, represents a mature approach to observability that maximizes value while controlling costs. This strategic approach to data management will likely become even more critical as the volume and complexity of telemetry data continue to grow exponentially.
Key Takeaway
For customer experience leaders, the key takeaway from Pradeep’s insights is clear: observability is no longer optional in delivering exceptional digital experiences. The organizations that will thrive in the coming years are those that view observability not as a technical necessity, but as a strategic capability that enables them to understand, predict, and optimize every aspect of their customer interactions.
Regional Perspective
The regional perspective Pradeep brought to our discussion also highlights an important global trend. As digital transformation accelerates across diverse markets, the lessons learned in dynamic regions like India and South Asia often provide valuable insights for organizations worldwide. The ability to adapt observability strategies to different technological maturity levels, cultural contexts, and business requirements is becoming an essential skill for customer experience professionals globally.
As we reflect on the companies Pradeep mentioned—from Adidas Runtastic’s fitness ecosystem to Domino’s delivery optimization, from Ryanair’s travel experience to Topgolf’s entertainment innovation—it’s evident that observability excellence transcends industry boundaries. What unites these diverse organizations is their commitment to understanding and optimizing every millisecond of their customer interactions.
Competitive Advantage
The future that Pradeep envisions, where observability platforms become increasingly intelligent and predictive, promises to further blur the lines between technology operations and customer experience management. As these platforms evolve to provide not just technical insights but customer behavior predictions and business impact forecasting, the role of observability in driving competitive advantage will only grow.
Focus on Business Outcomes
For organizations embarking on their observability journey, Pradeep’s practical advice provides a clear roadmap: start with customer-impacting metrics, build cross-functional collaboration, and focus on business outcomes rather than just technical performance. This customer-centric approach to observability ensures that technological investments directly translate into improved customer experiences and business results.
Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into the future of customer experience through intelligent observability. The insights shared today by Pradeep Seshadri offer a compelling vision of how organizations can leverage advanced monitoring and AI-powered analytics to create exceptional digital experiences that drive customer loyalty and business growth.
Stay Tuned
Stay tuned for more episodes of CX Quest, where we continue to explore the cutting-edge strategies, technologies, and insights that are shaping the future of customer experience. Until next time, remember that in the world of digital customer experience, every millisecond matters, and the organizations that master the art and science of observability will be the ones that define the next generation of customer excellence.
