The best session replay tools for improving customer experience

Every website and mobile app should be built with the customer in mind. Unfortunately, how we expect our customers to act and how they actually act are not always the same thing. Sometimes, we’ve forgotten to take something into account, but most often they simply surprise us by not behaving how all our careful analysis told us they would. When trying to understand the gap between planned experience and actual experience, it’s helpful to have the best session replay tools available.

Using session replay to discover the real customer experience

For years, when trying to determine how to measure digital customer experience, businesses have turned to reliable solutions such as Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics. These tools collect accurate data on all tagged interactions on the website. However, if an element hasn’t been tagged, it doesn’t get tracked. So untracked actions result in an incomplete view of the customer journey.

When the customer experience deviates from the expected path, it could simply result in a longer-than-expected journey to the end conversion. But other times, if a customer hits a bump in the road, they can get frustrated with their inability to find what they were looking for and abandon the site or app.

Session replay can help you discover what causes some customers to struggle on their journey and fail to make the desired conversion. Glassbox integrates easily with analytics solutions and collects every interaction on your website or mobile app, capturing both client-side and server-side data. This allows you to see not only what the customer sees, but also what they don’t see, such as AJAX errors.

Choosing the best session replay tools for your needs

When choosing a session replay solution, first determine what it is you need. What pain points are you trying to address, and what features could help you do so? Consider tagging, mobile capabilities, time delay in replay, and more.

Glassbox requires no tagging, capturing 100% of interactions without a lengthy, complicated setup. With tag-based solutions, you don’t know what you don’t know, and you can miss key parts of the customer journey. Glassbox gives you a complete view of every website or mobile app session.

Another key part in the customer journey is mobile app usage. Choosing a solution that captures mobile data in addition to website activity will help you create the best customer experience for the growing number of users who prefer mobile devices. When looking for mobile solutions, look for something with a light SDK so it doesn’t unnecessarily bulk up your app which can result in slow performance and crashes.

If you’re looking to implement customer experience solutions quickly and efficiently, having access to near-instantaneous session replay can be invaluable. Identifying problems as they happen can allow your CX teams to address them just as quickly and prevent interruptions in the customer journey.