By Audelia Boker, VP Marketing at Glassbox Digital

Recording and replaying customer interactions over digital platforms has rapidly become an essential function for any online transactional organisation. Not only does it meet compliance regulations (avoiding fines and reputational damage!), it also provides real insight into what your customers want, how they engage with your digital channels and highlights any issues that could threaten your relationship with them.

With a number of options on the market for session record/replay, there are some basic points you need to consider before making a choice. Here are top six essentials for any successful solution.

Automatic and tag-less recording 

Automatic recording ensures you don’t inadvertently miss unexpected interactions or scenarios within interactions, due to not properly tagging your website or app. However, even a 100% recording system needs to know which customer interactions you want.

If you manually configure events and tags you could be missing out on valuable data. If a recording solution requires pre-configuration or tagging each time the website is updated, you can never be sure you’re recording 100% of the sessions. Furthermore, you enter a long cycle of interdependencies with IT which dramatically slows down your time-to-insight. This is where tag-less recording is invaluable.

The system automatically captures every possible piece of data you can think of across your channels and indexes it, even if a human operator may think it is inconsequential and ignore it. Automated tag-less recording also provides comprehensive historical data, allowing you to fully investigate any issues in retrospect, even if these elements are not on your site/app anymore.

A single platform for web and mobile

For the modern online customer, there should be no distinction between the way they access your services. Whilst a lot of online business is still conducted over traditional web access (through a PC or laptop), increasingly mobile platforms have taken centre stage.

Mobile devices offer greater convenience for access and a dedicated app is often the easiest and most effective way for a customer to access the services they want. This could be new business, but often it is for repeat business orders where an app is most useful.

It is also very common for people to browse on one device and buy on another (perhaps at a different part of their busy day). Having a single record/replay platform for all these channels enables you to stitch all these journeys together. Therefore, it gives a far more comprehensive view of customer interactions and ensures that every stage is documented for compliance or issue resolution.

Full insights from replay

Being able to replay interactions is only half of the battle, you also need to get actionable insights from it! Replaying an interaction in isolation may be useful for resolving a query or dispute, but it won’t identify trends or wider issues.

The right solution will identify underlying issues (perhaps a glitch on your website/app or a pricing discrepancy, or even a performance issue on a specific server, affecting the online experience of visitors from a specific location) and immediately alert you to potential problems. It will highlight any customer struggles and present a wider ‘Digital Truth’ about the efficiency of your sales and customer service channels.

Openness and integration

It is highly beneficial to have a record/replay technology that works directly with your other business systems. This could be your web analytics tools, but equally your VOC, A/B testing, campaign management or CRM system, or even your Data Lake.

Being able to openly share the insights from customer record/replay data amongst your departments/team and trigger business processes based on these insights, will make your business more agile and able to cope with any issues, or indeed additional influxes of traffic (such as promotions or a sale).

For example, if there is an issue with sales, or customer services reports difficulties with a product, the entire organisation can be galvanised as one entity, tackling issues and meeting customer expectations.

Compression of data files

There is a fine balance between recording everything you need and managing your data storage effectively. If your system is recording 100% of interactions there could be large amounts of data involved and storage can be expensive, be it on premise or in the cloud.

Being able to compress data effectively is vital. It needs to be efficiently reduced to meet storage requirements, but also fully retrievable and usable when required. It is important to look at the total cost of ownership verses usability, to find the ideal sweet spot.

The right solution will balance these perfectly, ensuring data is massively compressed, stored and fully useable for however long its needed – be that for operational needs or regulatory compliance.

Security and privacy

In the same way as recording voice calls, recording digital interactions needs to be fully secure and compliant with legislation. In many cases these records will include personal and financial data, so need to be protected by the highest levels of security and advanced masking capabilities.

All files need to be encrypted to protect against theft, but also for internal security. For instance, with financial records there is no need for every employee in the organisation to be able to see all the details – so the replay solution needs to determine internal security clearance too.

It is also pertinent to have a solution which will ultimately securely destroy older records or indeed those of the customer should they demand it. An excellent search function within the solution is essential in achieving this too.

For further advice on the latest record/replay technology and the options for integrating it with your business, please visit: www.glassboxdigital.com