Using session replay tools for digital user experience optimization
Every time a user interacts with your website is an opportunity to impress them, to give them a reason to become a customer or even an active advocate of your business. The smallest improvement can have a huge impact on your bottom line, and a customer insight and user experience optimization solution helps you find the opportunities for those improvements.
Take website session replay. Session replay is technology that captures the movements of every visit to your website. Most advanced session replay tools will provide a timeline along the replay that can directly point you to an area of struggle or to where errors appeared. By doing so, you save time in viewing the web session replays, and by being able to jump directly to the most interesting insights.
Session replay is like watching a movie play out right in front of you. With only a small time delay, you can track a customer’s movements on your site and identify the success points, as well as places that need improvement along that way.
Every digital customer journey is unique. No two users swipe or click their way through a webpage in the same manner. And according to a report by McKinsey, today’s digital customer journey is even more critical. The digital experience is 35% more likely to impact a customer’s satisfaction and 32% more likely to predict customer churn. Your website needs user experience optimization in order to improve the performance of your website for as many people as possible.
The power of knowledge
Imagine a call center overflowing with calls from customers who are are getting an error in an important website process, and no one has any idea why. This is a frightening situation for any company, and session replay can help your contact center tackle the problem.
By seeing a session replay of the customer’s web session, call center agents are able to see exactly where the problem occurred and solve their callers’ issues quicker. The customer service team doesn’t have to spend time data mining or recreating the situation. It might not be a systemic problem, but rather something that is platform-based. The faster all of this is recognized, the faster a company-wide team can be put together to solve the problem on all fronts. As writer Melissa Thompson puts it in this article for News Blaze, “This means killing a flock of birds with one stone: improved customer experience; more knowledgeable and qualified staff; and reduced costs due to more cost-effective customer support service.”
The data collected through session replay tools can be used for more than just problem solving, however. It can assist in user experience optimization by tracking the digital customer journey, seeing what is attracting the eyes of the users or what is holding them up. Instead of taking your users through a maze of sites in order to get that conversion, by knowing their targeted interests, you can lead them to those pages faster, and in turn, increase your conversion rate.
The digital customer experience makes or breaks your business. Whether you’re selling organic coffee or business-facing web apps, it’s important that your customer’s interaction with your website leaves them smiling. A single change is all it could take.
When you use website session replay, you’re discovering more about your customer than you previously knew. Session replay capabilities make sure each and every one of those interactions has the highest chance of setting off the chain reaction that leads to a happy customer, improving customer satisfaction and gaining conversions.
This article was originally published on October 3, 2017. It was updated on May 22, 2020.
