Customer experience is everything. With software development teams racing to release new features faster than ever before, the risk of outages, performance issues, and bugs can skyrocket. When a product doesn’t work as expected, customers begin to lose confidence in it, and that trust is hard to win back. This often leads to customer attrition and churn—two outcomes that no business can afford. Research shows over 50 percent of customers will switch to a competitor after a single unsatisfactory customer experience underscoring the importance of excellent customer experiences. So how can software development teams balance speed and quality to maintain and enhance customer trust?
“LaunchDarkly allowed us to progressively deliver key features with confidence, creating a safety net for developers.”
Fabien Gasser Retail Lead System Architect, Christian Dior Couture (user evidence)
Current State
The struggle to balance speed and quality
Software development teams often find themselves caught between two equally important goals: maintaining a fast release cadence and ensuring a high-quality product. In the rush to deliver updates and new features, the focus on customer experience can fall by the wayside. Teams may release code without fully understanding how it will perform in the real world, leading to bugs, slow load times, or even system outages.
This reactive approach forces development teams to spend precious time fixing issues post-release rather than learning from user behavior and iterating on product features. It can create a degraded product and a missed opportunity to innovate and create experiences that customers genuinely love. And when issues do occur, customers often feel the impact first. Their experience with the product becomes frustrating, leading to a loss of trust. Over time, this can harm brand reputation, damage customer loyalty, and ultimately increase churn.
Without real-time visibility into release health, teams lack the observability needed to catch issues before they reach customers. Without the ability to learn from how customers interact with new features, product development stalls.
8% Decrease in customer churn
7% reduction in customer support inquiries
Source: February 2025 LaunchDarkly Customer Census Survey
Future state
Data-driven innovation and enhanced customer experience
Imagine a future where your software development team has access to real-time telemetry data that not only alerts you to potential issues but also offers insights into how customers use your product. In this scenario, your releases aren’t just faster—they’re smarter. Teams can monitor performance metrics in real time, catch bugs before customers ever notice them, and adapt quickly based on user behavior.
In this future state, development teams can focus on innovation rather than firefighting. With deeper observability, teams can make data-driven decisions to continuously refine the user experience. Customer trust isn’t eroded by outages or bugs; instead, it’s strengthened by a product that consistently meets expectations and evolves to better serve user needs.
Telemetry data becomes a powerful tool for improving both the health of your software and the overall customer experience. By closely monitoring how new features perform in the real world, you can make informed decisions that fuel your product roadmap. As a result, customer satisfaction improves, and their trust in your product deepens. Instead of risking customer loyalty with every release, teams are empowered to deliver experiences that delight users and build long-term relationships.
“Always use LaunchDarkly for releasing new features. It gives more confidence that if anything happens I can roll back by simply turning off a flag.”
Soojin H. Software Engineer, Deputy
LaunchDarkly Improves Developer Experience
How we solve it
Release with Confidence, Retain Your Customers
This is where Guarded Releases by LaunchDarkly comes in. Guarded Releases enables software development teams to uncover and automatically remediate software performance problems before they become customer issues. It helps maintain a seamless customer experience by embedding real-time monitoring directly into your release cycle, helping to ensure that any potential bugs or performance issues are addressed before they impact users.
With Guarded Releases, you can:
- Monitor releases in real time: Get complete visibility into how your software is performing from the moment it’s deployed. Guarded Releases tracks key metrics across all releases, automatically detecting anomalies and regressions that could degrade the user experience.
- Reduce customer-impacting incidents: By automatically correlating issues with the problematic release, Guarded Releases empowers teams to take immediate action—whether through a rollback or a fix—before customers feel the impact.
- Enhance user experience with data-driven insights: Through integrations with tools like Sentry, Segment, and OpenTelemetry, Guarded Releases brings together metrics from across your stack. This allows teams to learn from customer behavior, iterate on features, and ensure that future releases are even more customer-centric.
Guarded Releases reduces the risk of customer-impacting incidents and accelerates your team's ability to innovate. With a clear view into how changes affect user experience, teams can fine-tune their releases and build better products faster and more confidently.
Deliver better software with confidence
Help ensure that your releases don’t compromise product quality while still maintaining high engineering velocity. Leveraging release-level insights in real time helps teams understand how software changes impact the end-user experience.
- Correlate key performance metrics, like errors and latency, to targeted release audiences to know if changes in the release impact users.
- Learn how the introduced changes affect metrics over time with persistent tracking of rollout results between variations.
