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Transforming online behaviour into profit
By Thomas Cowper Johnson, Marketing Director, ServiceTick
The changing paradigm of e-commerce is transforming the internet from a selling channel to a buying channel. With the balance of power shifting from corporate to customer, companies need to understand what their prospects are doing online and they need this information in real-time. A new generation of web session replay technologies is taking analytics far beyond the real-time recording of user activity and is creating a performance platform that can manage the complete online customer experience.
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Web session recording technologies offer multiple means of managing customer experience and brand reputation and driving profit.
Improving web usability – session replay tools can solve design & usability problems by letting site owners see how customers use their web site in a live environment, identifying problems and defects, complementing web site usability reviews and supporting Multivariate Testing (MVT) programmes. Heatmaps offer a visual way of identifying and reporting issues and aggregated activity data generates new KPIs and metrics for management reporting.
Rapid identification of site issues – with a clear view of how customers have actually navigated the site, IT teams can identify and address issues much more rapidly. This produces a double benefit of freeing up resource (by speeding up the process of fixing) and bringing revenue streams back more qui
ckly.
Resolving customer problems – most multi-channel brands have the capability to manage customer relationships across a range of touch points. Prospects who encounter problems online may contact a call centre to try to resolve their issues. But consumers don’t always make the best web analysts; struggling to explain the issues they have encountered they can end up even more frustrated. Giving call agents the capability to replay the customer’s unfruitful web journey before they call back leads to issues being resolved more swiftly and customers sent away happy.
Tackling online fraud – as consumers become more savvy about online sales processes some may abuse the privacy of buying in their own home and try to take liberties. Replay technologies offer an indisputable visual archive of what an individual has actually done on a website, maintaining a vault of recorded customer sessions for legal, audit and compliance purposes. This can be used as a record of ‘terms and conditions acceptance’, to identify prospects who try to manipulate risk data in online quotations to secure a cheaper quote, or even to record the actual price accepted in a booking.
Enhancing customer analytics – companies can enrich the value of their analytics by observing the actual customer visits that relate to the data. A unique identifier can be allocated to each recorded web session and stored as a custom value within Google Analytics, giving a new dimension to customise analytic reports.
The leading web session replay technologies provide unrivalled insight into how customers use the website. But, if you are new to these technologies how can you be sure which system is right for you? Here is a checklist of what capabilities you should look for:
- Make sure the supplier and solution is right for your business. Some suppliers specialise in SME solutions, others in enterprise-level solutions.
- The technology must be easy to install. Some products need to be installed within a client’s data centre; installing technologies that impact core IT systems is notoriously difficult especially in large organisations so you might prefer a solution that has a lighter technological footprint. Some ‘record and replay’ technologies do not work with clients who host their applications in the cloud so be sure to check.
- Not all session replay systems can record everything you need them to. If you’re not getting the full picture you’re not getting the full insight. Watch out for systems that are not able to record dynamic aspects of a website - such as text and image replacement, tooltips, navigational drop-downs, carousels, lightboxes and animated effects.
- Beware siloed systems. Most companies have a range of insight and analytics programmes; these work best when they work together – data integration leads to effective insight. But some session replay technologies report in a siloed way and cannot offer the data integration your business needs.
- Payback is vital to any business. Feedback programmes must deliver actionable data that feeds through to the bottom line. You want your feedback to improve conversion rates and reduce basket abandonment. Key to this is the ability to review activity and respond in realtime.
- Continuing support is essential. You can have all the data in the world but if you don’t know what it is telling you then it is no use. You need to be sure that the system you buy will come with appropriate support that will help you interpret data. Some companies may surround you with ‘sales love’ at the beginning of a relationship and then disappear. Make sure you understand the level of service support that is on offer from the outset.
