New Feature: Guided Test Drive

As consumers in today’s digital world, we often do vast amounts of research before making any sort of purchase. This applies to both personal and corporate purchases. According to Adweek, 81% of shoppers conduct online research before buying.  The larger the purchase the higher the stakes, the more time we want to spend researching. When making a large purchase like IT software, the importance of making the correct buying decision invariably increases. When doing research, you’re going to look at prices, talk to peers or friends, look at competitive comparisons online before reaching out to sales. Having too much information at our disposal, however, can be overwhelming and make it arduous to separate valuable information from marketing jargon.

When I was shopping for a car, I did tons of research online to understand what the best options were based on my needs before narrowing the field down to the final few contenders. Being a single adult without a family in Los Angeles meant I didn’t have a need for certain features such as heated seats or large cargo room. Once I got to the dealership, I knew exactly which car I wanted to test drive and wasn’t keen on hearing the sales pitch. Even though I knew what car I wanted, it was still important to take it for a test drive where I could validate if that specific car and the set of features were right for my needs and situation.

Having the chance to properly evaluate and test drive each option can confirm whether our online research was correct and if the item will meet our needs. This idea of ‘try it before you buy it’ lets you truly understand which option fits your needs.

Buying IT software isn’t much different. This buying decision is a large purchase and there is plenty of information online that make it burdensome to evaluate different tools. Your choice in software, however, directly affects your organization’s employees and their ability to do their job and meet goals. Just like you wouldn’t buy a car without taking it for a test drive, would you buy software without trying it out during your evaluation?

But evaluating software can be a pain. Scheduling time to sit through sales calls and demos makes you feel like you are jumping through hoops to see a tool you aren’t even sure will meet your needs. Committing time and resources to attend meetings isn’t always feasible or convenient. And if you are able to schedule a meeting with all stakeholders, hope a critical issue that needs to be resolved doesn’t occur at the time of the meeting. Unfortunately, not many software vendors allow their prospective buyers to test drive their tool without first dedicating time speaking with sales.

With so many roadblocks to properly evaluate IT software, we have launched Guided Test Drive to make it easier for teams evaluating Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) software. We felt it was important that we more closely align with the way individuals buy versus creating unnecessary friction. Catchpoint’s Guided Test Drive allows you to explore our DEM platform at your leisure.

Select from nine walkthroughs of use cases and features that were developed specifically to match the top needs of IT ops professionals.

Use Case walkthroughs:

• API Monitoring
• CDN Comparison
• Provider Management
• Application Performance
• Network Monitoring
• Web and Mobile Content
• New Market Testing
• Dashboards and Visualizations
• Customizable Alerting/ Errors

To learn more about Guided Test Drive and to get started, check out our free trial information.