Leading web development platform gains unparalleled user intelligence with Affogata, delights its customers.

The challenge: siloed data, delayed insights

The company offers a complex, cloud-based SaaS solution, and has thousands of employees spread throughout dozens of offices globally. With hundreds of millions of users using hundreds of the brand’s products, each with its thousands of features - large and small - it can seem a daunting task to keep track of it all, and for the team to understand how its customers are thinking and feeling about the brand. For certain technical metrics, like knowing if a particular page is live, the company’s production team collects data and tracks it using technical tools such as Grafana and Pingdom. However these tools are limited in that they do not aggregate data from multiple sources, and even though Pingdom has advanced monitoring capabilities, everything it tracks needs to be configured ahead of time; in other words, Pingdom needs to be told exactly what to watch. This means that if something unexpected happens, or an important incident crosses over multiple functionalities, it could be missed by both tools. A crucial data source for the company is its Answers page combined with social chatter, which serves as its customer support ticketing, chat and knowledge base system. In order to analyze any of the data in the Answers page, the team needed to put in a request for one of their BI system experts to generate a report, a process which was time consuming and delayed the insights to the point where they often became irrelevant. Also, the tools they used are designed for technical, not business users, and the brand wanted to ensure that it’s customer support, marketing, and even its executive team, were aware of how the users’ voice is being influenced by each technical incident. The company needed a solution that would provide the big picture of what was happening with its solution and its users, so the web development platform’s business managers could focus on keeping its customers delighted with a solution that always meets their needs.

The solution: reactive and proactive customer intelligence

Aggregates multiple data internal and external sources for valuable insights

The company found that Affogata solved many of the missing pieces in their customer experience puzzle. They use Affogata to extract insights from data collected from external as well as internal sources, for example, social media channels, reviews, as well as their customer support tickets on the Answers page. Insights are surfaced automatically by Affogata, and can also be searched proactively by the company’s team. Affogata is easy to search, and does not require any advanced Business Intelligence tools such as Tableau to generate new insights, it surfaces relevant insights automatically.

Analyze incidents using Affogata

Once the team has all this information collected in one place, if they become aware of an incident - for example, a problem with checkout and coupons - they can do keyword searches within Affogata to measure its impact on their customers. They use Affogata as a tool for looking back at what happened, and analyzing how it has affected their customers - are they angry about the incident? Do they see it as no big deal? How has it affected their Brand Reputation Score in comparison with the competition?

Early alerts for certain incidents

The web development platform discovered, however, that in many cases, Affogata’s alerts would precede notifications it received from other tools they were using, which meant that Affogata would be the trigger for examining an incident. For example a traffic slowdown could be talked about on social media or in the Answers page before a crash actually happens. In such a case, users could be talking about it online before it would trigger an alert in the DevOps monitoring solutions. Affogata sends an alert about this anomaly directly to the relevant brand’s Slack channel, so they can prevent a larger crisis before it happens. In many cases, by tracking unstructured data from multiple sources and analyzing it with AI, Affogata will surface an issue before any of the technical monitoring solutions do.

For the future: new, unique data sources

Delighted with the insights Affogata distills from the current data sources it aggregates for them, the company has plans to incorporate additional sources that will help it gain an even more thorough view of its business. For example, by integrating the Google Analytics of the company’s status page as a data source, Affogata can correlate between a spike in visitors to this page and increased trouble tickets to provide early alerts of sitewide issues.