Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP)
Gibraltar can be used by small- and mid-size teams to create a customer experience
improvement that collects information about how your customers use your programs
and about some of the problems they encounter. Gibraltar makes it easy to collect
and analyze this data to improve your products and features customers use most often
and to help solve problems.
What types of products is this suitable for?
Gibraltar is compatible all .NET applications built on .NET 2.0 SP1 and beyond.
Gibraltar is particularly well-suited for creating a CEIP for desktop applications
as it includes built-in capabilities to transmit data to the development team. Using
Gibraltar to collect and analyze usage data can improve team productivity and reduce
testing and support costs for a wide variety of teams:
- In-house corporate development projects benefit by having usage data to track
adoption rates by the organization as well as proactively tracking and responding
to any user errors that occur.
- Outsourced software development projects benefit by accelerated problem diagnosis
and troubleshooting resulting in shorter test schedules and higher customer satisfaction.
Both the consultant and the client benefit by having detailed usage data documenting
adequate testing with acceptable error rates.
- Independent Software Vendors (ISV/mISV/uISV) benefit by improved understanding
of their customers and an enhanced ability to quickly respond to issues and build
customer loyalty.
What data does Gibraltar collect?
Gibraltar efficiently and safely records errors, system events, trace messages,
configuration details, system performance metrics and application-specific custom
metrics. It transmits this information to the software team, indexes it, aggregates
it, and provides powerful tools for the team to explore broad patterns across multiple
users as well as drilling down to analyze individual sessions.
Custom metrics are particularly important for CEIP programs because they enable
simple data collection and analysis of a broad range useful data. Typical usages
include tracking feature utilization and monitoring system throughput, performance,
and reliability.
How does Gibraltar manage all that data?
Gibraltar indexes incoming session data providing reporting and data analysis functions
that let you monitor patterns across multiple sessions as well as drill-down into
the details of a single session. This includes automatically categorizing sessions
by length, operating system, computer and linking each unique error with the associated
sessions in which it occurs.
Gibraltar can easily manage thousands of sessions making it suitable for many projects.
Gibraltar is attractive to many teams because it is a very affordable solution that
is easily integrated with their products and workflow.
How are privacy concerns addressed?
Gibraltar has the flexibility to work with whatever privacy policy is appropriate
for your .NET products. You can configure what information is collected and when
collected data is sent to implement a broad range of policies, such as:
- Automatic transmission of all information is often appropriate for beta testing
or in-house corporate applications for which users have granted consent as part
of agreements they accepted prior to installing the program.
- Automatic transmission after opt-in may be appropriate for commercial software
products to ensure informed consent and maintain a high-degree of transparency and
trust with your customers.
- Prompt for transmission after errors asks the user for consent to transmit
log data at the end of an application session only if the session contains errors.
- Transmit upon user request makes it easy for a customer to submit data when
they wish. This option is available by default in Gibraltar-enabled applications
by clicking a configurable hotkey or it can be invoked programmatically with one
line of code.