Data Enablers: Catchpoint, Doing It Better Online — Powered By Data

They say an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure — and nowhere is that more apparent that in the world on buying and selling online. No matter what the retailer sells, the goal is to find the problem before it becomes a problem and hopefully stamp it out.

And that, in essence, is what Catchpoint does for its partners: It uses data to figure out what might go wrong — and to solve the problem before it starts.

Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and cofounder of Catchpoint Systems, explained that as a digital performance intelligence firm, Catchpoint’s goal is to keep clients up to speed and wholly dialed into the performance (e.g., speed, reliability) of their online services.

Catchpoint’s goal: Make it possible to deliver amazing digital experiences to their customers.

“Catchpoint is the only performance-monitoring platform that provides integrated synthetic and real user monitoring, comprehensive test types, real-time analytics, and a geographically diverse node network to help companies continuously monitor and preempt performance problems and optimize service delivery. More than 380 customers in over 30 countries trust Catchpoint to strengthen their brands and grow their businesses,” Daoudi noted.

Online sales, Daoudi noted, are about speed since there is only a three-second window during which shoppers are willing to wait for a web page or application to load before getting frustrated.

And making the customer mad online has real consequences — a recent Harris Poll survey found that about half of frequent online shoppers are likely to visit a retailer’s brick-and-mortar store if they have a negative experience shopping on their website.

“Poor online performance has a direct negative impact on conversions, brand awareness and customer satisfaction,” Daoudi noted. “At Catchpoint, we are dedicated to helping our retail customers understand the end-user experiences they are delivering across a broad range of geographies and take steps to optimize those experiences.”

And those experiences, he noted, aren’t impossible to deliver. In the run-up to founding Catchpoint, Daoudi actually found that the performance improvements merchants needed were often relatively simple techniques that could have been used to both measure and optimize performance. They just weren’t being used.

Which is how Catchpoint was born — out of an idea that a firm needed to exist to help businesses both understand their performance, as well as implement relatively simple, straightforward measures to help maximize that performance.

“The Bon-Ton Stores, Inc., is an example of a leading retailer using Catchpoint’s end-user experience monitoring solution to help optimize their customers’ digital experiences. The omnichannel retailer uses Catchpoint’s Synthetic (Active) Monitoring solution to ensure that its eCommerce website and mobile site deliver consistently high performance and to find and fix problems before they impact users,” Daoudi noted. “Bon-Ton chose Catchpoint for their extensive array of test types and the depth and speed of their analytical capabilities. These enable The Bon-Ton Stores to monitor a wide range of objects that can impact web performance for online retailers, including third-party services, CDNs, the cloud and other external services. Ultimately, this helps Bon-Ton provide a customer-friendly experience by correcting problems before they arise, potentially frustrating customers and threatening revenue.”

As for what’s next? Daoudi noted Catchpoint is looking forward to a future that is “very bright.”

As one might expect, a big part of the goal is to continue to attract new customers across retail as well as other industries.

“New customers include Morningstar, GAIN Capital and L’Oréal Group. Our customer total is now more than 380 and includes Fortune 1000 clients like Comcast, Honeywell, TripAdvisor and LinkedIn.”

Also on deck is expanding the firm’s geographic footprint by building out its worldwide network of monitoring nodes even further, “to support U.S. and multinational companies looking to tap into the world’s most rapidly growing ecommerce theaters, such as China, India and even places like Iran and Africa,” said Daoudi.

The point is to do it better — because customers don’t stick around otherwise. Catchpoint, said simply, wants to help retailers keep those customers — and has the data and the plan to do it.