Cosmetics company L’Oreal deployed Catchpoint’s end-user monitoring platform to manage and monitor its digital customer experience. L’Oreal’s digital business includes 35 brands across 140 countries, which it sought to measure and maintain.

According to L’Oreal’s Digital COO Axel Adida, each brand and each country represented something different to measure from a website performance perspective. “We manage thousands of websites.” Each country in its broad product portfolio has slightly different content, catalogs, and even different connectivity and access options available. In 2016, there were over 1 billion visits through L’Oreal’s websites.

The challenge for its web performance team was to deliver consistent performance to a widely-distributed geographic customer base and to ensure than its internal and external team members were all aligned.

Catchpoint’s end-user monitoring is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform with two main product lines. The first is synthetic — or proactive — monitoring, and the second is passive — or real user monitoring.

In the few years that L’Oreal has deployed Catchpoint, it has been using its synthetic monitoring services. The synthetic monitoring relies on signals from Catchpoint cloud nodes in major cloud provider regions. These include nodes for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM, and Tencent and Alibaba Cloud in China. This particular aspect of Catchpoint monitoring also leverages its own internet backbone, broadband, and last mile monitoring capabilities.

Currently, Catchpoint’s nodes intersect with over 80 of the countries that L’Oreal operates in. Using Catchpoint as a data source, along with other data sources, the cosmetics company was able optimize download speeds. In three key geographies, Catchpoint claims it improved speed by 35 to 50 percent. It also set speed KPIs for L’Oreal both internally and externally.

Adida said that prior to deploying Catchpoint they had no “at-a-glance” way to view the performance of all the content on each website. This was further complicated by needing to monitor mobile devices, on top of computers and laptops, and the “breakdown between 3G and 4G,” because not all of the countries which it operates in have access to 4G.

L’Oreal needed “to have a consolidated view of all of that, to be able to manage performance holistically, and make sure that we adjust our website to what best for consumers,” he said.

Apart from the consolidated view, Catchpoint also enabled L’Oreal to diagnose network issues. This makes it easier to communicate with the agencies that provide the websites with connectivity and make improvements that will directly enhance performance, Adida said.

Going forward, L’Oreal intends to expand its use of Catchpoint to include the real-user measurement tools. The real user monitoring enables customers to collect raw data from their services, clients, applications, devices, networks, page elements, and more. It helps to identify problems and focus the solutions where they are required the most and improve service delivery.