5 Ideas For Using Session Recording To Ensure Customer Satisfaction

Using session recordings (or replays) can greatly improve your customer satisfaction in many ways. What is session replay exactly and how can you leverage its power for outstanding customer experience?

Let us begin with some data backed by research on the importance of customer satisfaction in helping an organization accomplish its goals. 

Businesses moving on a positive growth trend are more likely to prioritize customer satisfaction than those with stagnant or negative growth trends. Companies must face it that their lack of focus on satisfying customers can result in a fall-off in revenue and growth. 

• Here’s why: Satisfied customers are also your best salespeople, as there is nothing better than word-of-mouth. According to Hubspot’s research 77% of people have shared positive experiences with companies in the past year.
• Furthermore, a good business strategy keeps your existing customers happy in the long run. A pearl of common business wisdom tells you that acquiring customers is 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining existing customers.
• Another research also proves that 30% of consumers will not give brands more than one chance after a bad customer service experience.

Traditional analytics tools display user activity on your web platforms, such as: 

• From where are the users visiting your web portal?
• What pages are they spending the most time on?

And more of such vague insights to learn how your product is performing. Here, a cutting-edge technology called session recording effectively resolved this ambiguity. And since its inception a decade ago, it has kept evolving and growing at a grander scale. We will learn more about it but first, let us see what Digital Journal has to say about session replay:

A global study confirmed that in 2019, the global Recording And Session Replay Tools market value was USD 205.8 million, and it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 23.6 percent to USD 921 million by the end of 2026. 

Before we hop on to learn the role of session recording, let’s first understand what session recordings are and why it is the need of the hour.  

 Source: Unsplash 

What is Session Recording Technology

Session replay is the precise replication of a user’s interaction on a website or web application as the user perceives them. Session replay recreates user actions on the site or app using logged user actions like mouse movements, clicks, page views, scrolling, tapping and more.

You can find session recording under many different names, such as session playback, user experience (UX) replay, mouse tracking, etc.

Session replay allows researchers to observe and learn from individual user actions while combining qualitative and quantitative data.

According to 360 Research Reports, the “Recording And Session Replay Tools Market” 2022 by Types (Cloud-Based, On-Premise), Application (SMEs, Large Enterprises) and Region – Global Forecast to 2026″, is anticipated to rise at a considerable rate during the forecast period, between 2022 and 2026.

Traditional qualitative research methods are time-consuming, difficult to perform, and often prohibitively costly. On the other hand, sessions recorded with a replay tool are affordable and available on-demand. You can leverage these sessions to improve any area of your online client experience.

How Does Sessions Recording Work?

It can be strange to view a session recording for the first time. You’ll wonder how you made a film of a user’s online experience: it is both intimidating and mesmerizing. Session replay is not just a screen recording; it provides invaluable insights into the user’s experience. 

Before you lose your focus, let us learn the basic technicalities that disclose the power of session replay. Here we’ll discuss the role of DOM, referred to as the Document Object Model. DOM is the physical structure where the users experience and interact with the web.

To better understand how session replay works let us take a peek into the working analogy of DOM. Imagine a structure with frames, paths, gateways and segments. These frames, paths, gateways and elements are the DOM structure’s foundation, constructed using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. 

Session replay records the DOM and all the distinct ways the user accessed the DOM. The session replay tool not only records and recreates accurately; it takes even the minor touchpoints that a user journeys while on your web portal.

These touchpoints in the DOM are either an event or an asset. So now, let’s learn what events and assets are.

Events

Every action on the internet needs the transmission of data. While the user’s experience is smooth, the user’s activity produces information with each movement, such as moving the mouse or swiping the screen. Each of those data exchanges is a minor event.

Assets

It is vital to record the “scene” where the events occurred. That’s why session replay systems also capture the related web assets including all the bits and pieces (such as pictures, HTML, CSS, etc.) that go into making a website or app look the way it does. 

Session replay technologies that do not include cache assets cannot reconstruct prior sessions if and when the web page or app changes. Saving the assets is critical.

Why Do You Need Session Recordings?

Session recordings provide a purpose beyond just being a part of your optimization process. They give you accurate, in-depth information about your visitors’ behavior so you can give them the best digital experience possible and achieve higher customer satisfaction. It fills the gap left by heatmaps and scroll maps by delivering granular information on your website or app client interactions.

Traditional tools like Google Analytics track user metrics such as the number of user sessions, bounce rate, exit time, etc. Though these are valuable information to get a hold of, this functionality does not provide much context and lacks crucial insights on user experience or engagement. 

For example, when Google Analytics tells you the dwell time of a visitor on your web page, this is a seemingly good metric from the analytics perspective. Still, we don’t know if the visitor spent 5 minutes looking for something they wanted or was confused and hung idle. So, you use session replays to precisely identify what the user was doing while he/she spent time on a page.

Session replays provide information on the complete user journey, such as taps, customer behavior, scrolling patterns, mouse movements, etc., including idle time. It also gives you more insight into what they require and a glimpse of their pain points.

The above information can help figure out ways to enhance customer satisfaction. However, before we deep dive to learn how session replays help improve customer satisfaction, let’s quickly go through the main aspects.

Three main aspects that you must focus on to improve customer satisfaction: 

• Reduce Response Times: 

Support teams can easily and quickly assess and handle client issues with session replays. In addition, support teams can swiftly resolve issues by watching what exactly users are experiencing on your portal.

• Understand User Experience:

Leverage empathy to understand your user requirements and transform your product into a user-friendly product. If your support team lacks understanding, it’s easy for them to conclude that a user error or a lack of expertise is the cause of a problem. 

Session records provide much-needed context for resolution. Teams can offer practical guidance if users are merely misclicking, for example. Recordings prove users experience functional difficulties or a bad UI design that frustrates basic tasks.

• Identify areas for improvement: 

You can easily and quickly find areas for development by evaluating many session recordings. Even minor changes, such as altering the color of a button or the font of a link, or shifting a web element to a new location on your website, may significantly impact customer satisfaction.

The Three C’s of Customer Satisfaction You Must Know

For visual learning, here is a quick video for you to watch and know what Mckinsey and company have to say about ways to improve customer satisfaction. 

Below, we will discuss five ways you can use session recordings & boost customer satisfaction in your organization.

5 Ways Session Replay Can Boost Customer Satisfaction

Session replay, as discussed earlier, provides clear and deeper insights to understand the customer. Understanding the customer helps enhance the customer experience, leading to higher customer satisfaction. So, let’s further know what the primary aspects that matter are.

According to CGS(largest BPO company in Chile), 38% of contact center’s priority is to  improve service levels in 2022. 

1. Understand Consumer Behavior 

It has been quite challenging for companies to collect customer feedback directly. In such a scenario, recordings of session replay rescue you. You can gather much important information about your users’ behavior from session records without having to ask them. Session recordings will allow you to see how genuine consumers engage with your items in real-time. 

Using session replay to understand customer behavior will give you the following insights:

• How much time do they spend using your portal?
• Where exactly do the visitors bounce?
• Where do the visitors face a bug or a problem?
• Which features do the visitors like the most?
• What do the visitors click on the most?

Leveraging the insights mentioned above, you can provide a personalized experience. In addition, such insights help you to correct complex elements on your portal that prevent your users from moving on to the next step. 

Once you resolve the complexities your visitors face, it will increase the stability of crucial features and the positioning of essential buttons in intuitive locations. This way, you are making your users happier by using recordings. A satisfied customer is more excited to engage with the product or even promote it to others.

 

2. Track Customer Journey

You’ll understand the visitor’s journey better if you record sessions. It’s much easier to map each touchpoint of the customer’s journey and spot behavioral patterns, abnormalities, or unexpected events.

Using session replay to track customer journey will give you the following insights:

• What parts of the customer journey aren’t required?
• At what points do the users pause for longer than necessary?
• What are the issues that are producing conflict or ambiguity?

Source: Pexels

You may restructure the customer journey using this information to make it more seamless and error-free. You can also better locate consumers who had a unique encounter with your product by rewatching session records. 

Then, you’ll be able to contact them right away to get more feedback and learn about their thoughts on the product. Not missing any chance to optimize customer journey will help you boost your customer satisfaction.

3. Enhance User Onboarding

A good user onboarding process is critical for client retention and satisfaction. It makes them feel that they made the right decision by choosing your product and adding value to their experience. In addition, session recordings provide invaluable insights using analytics that you can leverage in the user onboarding process.

Using session replay for onboarding will give you the following insights:

• What is the average amount of time a user spends on each phase of the onboarding process?
• Where do people get perplexed and unsure about how to proceed?
• Where do people frequently abandon your product before finishing the onboarding process (e.g., filling out their profiles or publishing their first report)?

To achieve outstanding customer satisfaction, optimize user onboarding. Add required modifications and eliminate elements confusing the user. Once you’ve identified where and why users are having problems, make the procedure easy for them and they’ll believe your product is worthy.

4. Recognise Issues & Challenges

Recognizing issues and challenges is an obvious step toward improving customer satisfaction. However, as an organization, you can’t just stop at the diagnosis of the issue. You have to resolve the issue for the customer’s comfort in using your product. 

In addition, not all customers communicate or even reach out to get issues resolved. So, do you have to contact customers all the time to know what’s bothering them? Not a wise choice, right?

In such scenarios, session replays help resolve these issues and challenges. So, let’s learn how session replay helps.

For product and UX teams, session recording and replay are beneficial in the following two ways: 

• It enables them to co-browse user sessions, better understand how customers engage with their products and address the spotted issues. 
• It also assists them in comprehending user behavior at various phases of the client journey.

Leveraging session replay, you can quickly identify the core cause of a problem by looking at other users’ sessions. You don’t need to contact your consumers, ask for extra information, or annoy them by requesting to describe their problems in detail.

5. Measuring New Feature Adoption

Introducing a new feature always has two sets of users, one set of users supporting it and the other set condemning it. And oh! How could we forget the neutral ones? Some users love to be in their comfort zone, others are always looking forward to new features. 

So, for the successful addition of a new feature, you must have a session replay that can let you see how your consumers interact with new features. It’s simpler to determine the value of an attribute to a specific audience if your session replay tool can segment your users. 

By using session replay for introducing a new feature will give you the following insights:

• What is the average amount of time a user spends on new feature adoption?
• Where are the users unsure about taking action?

As a result, you can better organize your marketing and digital sales strategy simultaneously, enhancing the visibility of your new feature.

Is Session Replay Secure?

Privacy is an essential component of session replay. Companies must warn consumers in written format about how they utilize session recordings and allow users to opt-in or out as per their choice if they use these technologies. Furthermore, businesses must be open about the data they acquire and how they intend to utilize it.

Replay tools must include capabilities that don’t capture personal information from users and hide specific user actions. 

For instance, recording software should ideally allow you to disguise any user inputs — such as exact values entered in forms or checkboxes — while still observing how people interact with your site’s features. Software that allow granular input modifications depending on specific features, such as form buttons, tables, or data lists, are also worth considering.

So, do you have any more doubts whether session replay is secure or not? 

If you still aren’t convinced that session replay is secure, you can reach out to us to learn more about it. Your privacy is our priority.

Conclusion

Customer satisfaction is critical to the success of your company. If your consumers are dissatisfied, they won’t be loyal to your service or product. 

In addition, the SaaS industry is not just evolving but expanding, with customers having ample options to choose from. No firm can thrive or sustain to compete in the long run if it has a high churn rate.

We learned how session replay provides you with insightful and technical guidance for improving customer satisfaction. But that’s only the beginning. It is now up to you to implement these strategies and customer satisfaction initiatives. It is your responsibility to improve customer happiness by iterating and even innovating, for the success of your company.

We hope this adds value to your research in boosting your organization’s customer satisfaction. Happy learning and researching!

Author bio:

Matej Mešár is a copywriter with a journalistic background based out of Bratislava, Slovakia. Currently, he has his sights set on the SaaS sphere.
He works for CloudTalk, helping to create compelling messaging in support of the next generation of cloud communication.

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