Header background

Session Replay: bullet-proof strategy for customer support

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what is a video worth? Well…the exact amount to win your case—and nowhere is this more true than in the realm of Customer Support. In any given transactional website, typically users call into support departments because:

  • The user session is not allowing them to accomplish their goals
  • The user session on the website did not result in the expected outcome

In both cases, the user’s expectation is that the issues they faced in that session will be resolved in a single phone-call/interaction with customer support. It’s not surprising that in certain markets, 83% of customers prefer dealing with human beings over digital channels to solve customer services issues… and 45% will actually even pay MORE for a product based on the assurances of high levels of customer service . However, human interaction also means the most difficult cases can often turn into a “he said/she said” story, where the resolution of an issue can ultimately come down to the credibility of the company over the individual user—which could negatively impact satisfaction levels among the user-base as well as the general perception of the organization’s ability to effectively resolve customer issues.

Let’s take as the example a typical self-service travel website which allows users to research options for flights, then book their preferred results. The travel site’s customer support team receives a call from an irate customer stating every time he selects a specific airline and fare, the website hangs and doesn’t allow him to advance to the next screen to complete the purchase. As there are several other popular self-service websites to book travel in the market, high performance is essential to remain competitive and viable in this space. Under normal circumstances, the customer service rep would first pull up the customer’s record, as well as possibly any log activity to see what took place.

Often times the reservation systems themselves are limited to viewing only transactional data from their own servers, when in reality this website is pulling data from a number of 3rd parties, such as airline and other reservation systems, banner ads for other offers hosted on other cloud platforms etc.; any of which could be the culprit for the performance issues the customer is experiencing. The satisfaction level of this irate user and credibility of the website depends on the customer service representative’s ability to resolve this technical issue and complete the user’s transaction to provide the expected outcome.

Session Replay from Dynatrace is a fit-for-purpose solution that empowers today’s forward-looking organizations to address these exact scenarios faced by Customer Support teams who deal with web and mobile customer transactions. Session Replay captures the complete digital user experience, transferring it to a user-friendly, playable digital interface in a “movie-like” experience, then indexes the output for easy search and discovery.

Under the aforementioned scenario, when the irate customer calls-in, the customer support representative would not only have access to the transactional data from the reservation interface, but a video replay of that customer’s entire experience. After a very quick review, the customer support rep would have seen that despite the user’s flight and time selection, the customer’s preferred flight initially showed as available for purchase among the search results, but after a brief system update between the travel application and the third-party airline’s master reservation system, the flight’s status was updated to unavailable, causing the system to hang and the inability to execute the transaction. With this information, the customer support team can quickly resolve the performance issues having to do with the synch between systems, which would then allow only available flights to show such that the customer can complete their booking; a win-win for everyone involved.

The ability to quickly and effectively identify and understand issues relating to user error, system failures (whether initiated by the host website or from third-party data or applications) is the key to a successful Customer Support strategy. Forrester states 73% of customers find “first contact resolution” to be the highest factor for customer satisfaction.

Session Replay is the silver-bullet that removes the doubt and guess-work pertaining to digital transactions, allowing today’s embattled Customer Support teams to confidently and effectively engage with their stakeholders so they can quickly isolate and resolve issues– resulting in an increase in team productivity, site performance and overall customer satisfaction.

To get further information on Session Replay, watch an introductory video, or to sign up for our Early Access Program (EAP), please visit us at this link.