Integrating User Sentiment with Digital Performance and UX Monitoring

In a rapidly expanding digital world in which user experience is synonymous with business performance, improving that experience is essential. However, it is not easy to fully gauge what users are truly experiencing and until now, companies have not had access to a monitoring solution that integrates what users are feeling and saying into their product. In an industry-first move, Catchpoint is excited to announce the addition of ‘user sentiment’ to its advanced digital experience monitoring (DEM) platform. In both cases of customer and employee experience, their ‘user sentiment’ should not be ignored.

The End User is at the Heart of Every Digital Business

Before we look at user sentiment, it’s worth noting that most APM, ITIM and NPMD tools largely ignore the user and the network last mile. Put simply, the majority of monitoring tools are incompatible with today’s digital world.

In its recent Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring, Gartner identifies how, “I&O leaders often deploy monitoring tools that are domain-centric and do not provide perspective on the overall user experience, resulting in a focus on the wrong areas.” Gartner recommends that I&O leaders instead turn to DEM technologies “that monitor the performance of applications from the end-user perspective.”

Understanding user experience is critical for any business. Having a broad range of perspectives in your monitoring strategy is essential to fully understand the performance of your digital services and applications, and how they are impacting your end users, both employees and customers.

From the outset, Catchpoint has differentiated itself from the competition by providing monitoring from the user perspective in, not from the server or cloud out. Our focus on the end user has remained unchanged despite a huge amount of infrastructure changes over the last decade.

The Missing Piece of the Monitoring Puzzle: User Sentiment

However, until now, APM and Digital Experience Monitoring vendors have been missing user sentiment, what Nik Koutsoukos, Head of Marketing at Catchpoint, calls, “the missing piece of the monitoring puzzle.”

The Internet acts as a megaphone for customer opinions and feelings. With review sites like Yelp and social media platforms like Twitter, customer reviews are easy to find and can have a huge impact on public perception of your brand, whether positive or negative. While complaining customers can be challenging, they can also be highly valuable in highlighting the pain-points of your customer service system.

Tracking Tweets, reviews, comments, and complaints offer a valuable way to gain contextual insight into a wealth of qualitative data regarding your consumers’ experience with, and perception of, your company.

From the mid-summer 2020, Catchpoint platform customers will have access to the new user sentiment capability, offering businesses broader insight into the overall well-being of their brand directly from the Catchpoint portal.

“User sentiment is all about monitoring and analyzing what users say and feel about your service, so it’s a critical component of DEM. With the integration of user sentiment into our platform, companies can now leverage the most complete telemetry, to increase visibility and context, resulting in fewer blind spots and a faster way to resolve digital performance degradation”, says Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint.

Catchpoint Announces WebSee.com

In addition, as of today, Catchpoint has launched WebSee.com, a free resource focused on leveraging user sentiment to help organizations quickly respond to and better handle service outages. The free user sentiment portal gathers and analyzes global user sentiment data from over 1,000 sites, which is then verified by the Catchpoint platform.

This brand-new solution is delivered through a combination of three sources:

1. User sentiment analysis – gathered and analyzed from worldwide data
2. User self-reporting outages or performance issues directly, or through the use of a free Catchpoint browser extension
3. Catchpoint validation – for significant outages or slowdowns, Catchpoint will validate user self -reporting and report this on WebSee

In an easy-to-use interface, the Websee portal brings together any reported issues with a website or application over the last four weeks and the location they’re occurring in, recent user sentiment news and discussion activity, the type of device accessing the site by percentage ratio, and a quick comparison to similar websites.

WebSee.com and the Catchpoint browser extension are open to any interested parties.