It’s no question that providing customers and prospects with the best possible website experience is critical to acquiring new customers, maintaining loyalty, and driving conversions and revenue—especially during the pandemic while most interactions exist online rather than in-person. There are a handful of technologies that enable organizations to optimize the digital customer experience, an important one being session replay.

According to an Econsultancy survey, 95% of practitioners find session replay effective for measuring online experiences.

Session replay technology enables digital teams to watch back videos of real, anonymized users interacting with their websites.With an “over the shoulder” view, digital teams get a first-hand look at users’ digital body languages and can use that information to investigate areas where users are either engaged or frustrated. For example, cues like multi-click behavior signal user frustration, while mouse reading behavior indicates positive levels of user engagement. Session replay lets organizations discover the “why” behind the “what” that the web analytics team provides for a full picture view of the customer experience.

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Given that data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, 6 times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable as a result, every insight an organization has matters whether it’s quantitative user data from analytics platforms or qualitative user data from session replay.

That said, while highly insightful for understanding and optimizing user experiences, the often time-intensive nature of session replay beckons for better modes of efficiency. Humans are unable to sift through every user session that session replay provides – but artificial intelligence (AI) can.

Here’s a checklist of the seven most important capabilities that digital teams should look for in a session replay solution—with automation at the core:

Automated analysis to pinpoint the most important sessions and time stamps.

With AI baked into modern session replay, digital teams are notified of sessions that demonstrate key issues impacting the site’s user experience quality, so humans can focus on watching back sessions that truly matter. This is major time-saver for digital teams, as 65% of workers view AI as something that would free employees from menial tasks and keep them working on bigger priorities.

Segmentation between high-quality and low-quality experiences.

With automated segmentation technology embedded into session replay, digital teams can divide and review sessions by user experience quality. With the ability to granularly segment between high-quality and low-quality experiences, teams can cross-compare sessions to pinpoint key differences or discover common themes that make user journeys successful versus unsuccessful. This is a major advantage now that 72% of decision-makers believe using automated technology, like session replay segmentation, enables practitioners to focus on more meaningful work.

Behavior detection – being alerted to frustration/engagement automatically.

Session replays built with behavior detection technology will automatically find and timestamp user behaviors so digital teams can skip directly to those moments to determine what exactly causes engagement versus frustration on the site.

Detailed user journey mapping between devices and channels.

Not all users access a website the same way. Whether they’re on desktop, mobile, or even an app, this will fundamentally change the user journey and their user experiences along the way. With intelligent journey mapping, modern session replay will show digital teams exactly which channels, browsers, and devices users operate on as they interact with the website. This enables hyper-focused optimizations that allow digital teams to address specific issues only occurring in a certain segment of user journeys.

Heatmap integrations to contextualize user sessions.

Heatmaps and session replay complement each other. Given that heatmaps visualize user journey data in aggregate, digital teams pick out areas of interest (like a low-traffic product pages or high-traffic landing pages) and further investigate those experiences with session replay. This smart integration helps teams investigate and better understand how users interact with the website.

In-app filtering, tagging, and commenting for team collaboration.

With in-app filtering, tagging, and commenting capabilities, digital teams can easily collaborate on session replay findings, streamlining the optimization progress.

Tech-stack integrations to pair external data with related session replays.

By integrating session replay with external analytics data, like web analytics, customer analytics, or survey data, digital teams not only get better context around customer experience issues but directly indicate which sessions are leading to underperforming metrics or negative customer feedback—all of which should be investigated immediately. 

The impact of AI and automation is insurmountable across all industries, and digital customer experience is no exception. Because of AI, there may come a time in which humans never have to watch a single session replay—and, instead, can move faster on the insights the AI provides to optimize experiences and ultimately increase conversions.

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