Since companies started using them in the early 2000s, session replays have seen continuous adoption, with Research Nester projecting a 13.3% CAGR in the next couple of years. But are you missing out if you haven’t embraced this powerful technology? Today’s guide takes a deep dive into session replay for enterprise companies.
We’ll explore:
- The main use cases.
- Security challenges and what to look out for when choosing a session replay tool.
- Three of the best session replay software to consider.
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What is session replay?
A session replay is a reproduction of a user’s experience on your website or app. It captures their actions (e.g., clicks, mouse movements, scrolls) and what they see (e.g., pop-ups, page loading errors).
Below is an example of a session replay generated with Userpilot.
How does session replay work?
Session replays look so perfect you’d think they’re literal recordings of the user’s screen, but that’s far from reality.
Your website or app has something called the Document Object Model (DOM). It’s a structured representation of your platform’s interface that gets mutated with everyday user activity like clicks, taps, and form inputs.
Once installed, a session replay tool tracks these DOM modifications and sends the data to its servers for processing and storage. When you want to watch a replay, the tool reconstructs the user’s session by “replaying” those changes. This allows you to see exactly how users behave in your application.
What are the main use cases of session replay?
So, what can you use session replays for? There are many benefits, but here are five core use cases that every digital company will benefit from:
- Understand user behavior: Instead of relying on assumptions or aggregated data, session replays let you witness firsthand how users navigate your website or app, where they hesitate, and what causes them to abandon their journey. This granular insight makes it easy to understand user needs and enhance their experience.
- Improve conversion rate: Session replays help you answer CRO questions with more accuracy. For instance, if you’re not sure why a specific onboarding flow performs better than the other, you can pull out session recordings of both and watch how users interacted with the flow. You might spot a confusing instruction or an unclickable element that keeps users from moving forward with the least-performing flow.
- Evaluate new features: Just launched a new feature? Watch user sessions to spot hidden frustrations and unintended usage patterns that might be difficult to articulate in a survey.
- Avoid and reduce bug costs: Most session replay tools can show the exact steps a user took leading up to an error. This precise error-tracking allows your technical teams to prevent bugs before they affect a wide audience.
- Enhance customer support: A user session replay empowers your support team to provide truly personalized assistance. For instance, it can serve as a co-browsing tool that allows your support agents to see what users are complaining about and deliver immediate solutions.
How do enterprise teams leverage session replays?
Enterprise teams face unique challenges when it comes to optimizing user experiences across complex applications. Let’s discuss how session replays can help solve this problem:
Save debugging time for IT and engineering teams
Developers traditionally rely on activity logs to fix user frustrations. This approach works, but it consumes a lot of productive time.
A session recording tool can speed things up by showing your technical team exactly what a user did, what happened on the screen, and the error message displayed. For example, imagine a particular page of your app crashes each time a user tries to fill out a form. A session reply might reveal a conflict between the user’s input and the application’s data validation rules.
Another upside is improved team collaboration: your tech teams can share recordings of problematic sessions to communicate and understand complex issues. Userpilot makes this easy by empowering team members to leave notes at various points in the recording:
Help customer support teams better understand user issues
Enterprise support teams often deal with complex complaints that can be difficult to troubleshoot remotely. Plus, sometimes, users simply don’t know how to best explain their pain points.
Session recordings are useful here. Instead of having back-and-forths with users and increasing their frustrations, your support team can pull out a replay of that specific session and see what happened. This method will boost your time to resolution and potentially increase customer satisfaction.
Gather more insights for product teams to develop and validate features
Session replay isn’t just for troubleshooting; it’s also a goldmine of insights for your product team. By watching how users interact with your product, you can:
- Understand how users are really using your core features: See if they’re using them as intended or if they’re finding unexpected workarounds. This can spark inspiration for new updates and improvements.
- Improve and validate new features: During beta testing or after a new release, observe how users interact with new functionality. This helps you identify any usability issues or areas for refinement. For example, if users consistently struggle to find a specific setting or feature, the product team can use this insight to redesign the interface for better usability.
With session replay, your product team can make data-driven decisions and ensure that new features are truly valuable and user-friendly.
Improve conversion rate and identify upsell opportunities
Struggling to drive account expansion for your enterprise product? Session replays can help here as well.
Your teams can pair funnel analysis reports with session replays of churned users to better understand the reasons for drop-offs and improve conversions.
For example, if session replays reveal that many churned users repeatedly clicked on a non-functional button within a specific workflow, you can prioritize fixing that button.
Userpilot helps you track drop-offs and then directly access session replays of those drop-off users – all without coding:
Another thing you can do is watch how power users interact with your product. You might discover that they use advanced features or workflows that casual users are missing. Turn this insight into an upsell prompt that showcases the benefits of those advanced functionalities and invites other users to upgrade.
Looking for a Session Replay Tool for Your Enterprise? Try Userpilot
Is session replay enough to understand user interactions?
Short answer: No.
While session replays provide deep insights, they don’t tell the whole story.
The best approach is to combine these reports with quantitative data, such as funnel analysis, path analysis, or user surveys.
For example, after deploying an NPS survey, you can segment your detractors and watch their interaction sessions to identify common pain points or frustrations that led to their negative feedback.
What are the security cautions when choosing session replay tools?
With great power comes great responsibility. Session replay gives you incredible insights into user behavior, but it also comes with the responsibility of protecting sensitive data. Here’s what enterprises should look for when choosing session replay software:
- Data masking: When you’re watching session replays, you might inadvertently capture sensitive user data like passwords, credit card numbers, or personal identifiers. A good session replay tool should offer robust data masking capabilities. This means you can automatically redact or hide sensitive information by default, ensuring that you’re not exposing any confidential data.
- Data privacy: The session replay software should be able to encrypt data both in transit and at rest, to protect it from unauthorized access. Like Userpilot, your ideal session replay tool should also have access controls that limit who can view, share, and export recordings.
- Compliance: Enterprises need to comply with various data privacy regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Make sure your chosen session replay tool helps you meet these requirements. You can look for features like data retention policies, consent management, and audit trails to ensure compliance and avoid potential legal issues.
I’m happy to say that Userpilot takes security very seriously. We’ve built our session replay tool with all of these considerations in mind. We offer:
- Automatic data masking to protect sensitive information.
- Strong encryption and robust access controls to ensure data privacy.
- Compliance with major data privacy regulations to help you meet your legal obligations.
With Userpilot, you can enjoy the benefits of session replay without compromising on security or privacy.
What are the best session replay tools to consider?
While the market offers a plethora of session replay tools, finding ones that combine advanced analytics and enterprise-grade security can be challenging.
After careful evaluation, we’ve identified three that stand out:
Userpilot – a product analytics tool that simplifies your tech stack
Userpilot is an all-in-one product growth platform that helps businesses understand user behavior and deploy in-app experiences.
Key features:
- Advanced filters: Filter user sessions by specific actions, page visits, company data, and so on.
- Actionable insights: Use the skip inactivity button to save time and jump right to key user actions.
- Playlists: Organize sessions by workflows or user journeys for easy access.
- Collaboration: Leave notes, tag team members, and export recordings with ease.
- Data protection: With Userpilot’s SOC2 Type II certification, you can be sure that your data is protected through strong encryption, intrusion-detection mechanisms, access controls, and other industry best practices.
Beyond these session replay capabilities, Userpilot provides a comprehensive suite of analytics tools to help you understand and optimize user behavior. This includes features like:
- Behavioral analytics: Track user interactions, analyze trends, and identify patterns with auto-capture, funnel analysis, trends analysis, and user path analysis.
- User feedback: Gather valuable insights with in-app surveys and analyze responses to understand user needs and preferences.
All the data collected using these functions can be further utilized for in-depth analysis and reporting through various tools within Userpilot, such as:
- Metric dashboards: Utilize pre-built templates or create custom dashboards to visualize key metrics and track progress.
- Granular reports: Generate detailed reports on funnels, paths, trends, and other user behaviors to gain a deeper understanding of user interactions.
- User/company profiles: Create comprehensive profiles for individual users or companies to analyze their behavior and preferences.
- Segmentation: Segment users based on various criteria to analyze specific user groups and tailor your product experiences.
Lastly, Userpilot empowers you to take action on your insights with its experience builder. This allows you to create and deploy in-app experiences like tooltips, banners, spotlights, and more to guide users, promote features, and drive product adoption.
Quantum Metric – an analytics solution with AI insights
Quantum Metric is a digital analytics platform that lets you track user behaviors and quantify their impact on your business outcomes.
Key features:
- Quantified user impact: Identify the scope and impact of user issues by seeing how many users are affected by the same problem.
- FelixAI: This generative AI tool provides summaries and insights within the session replay window. It can highlight potential problems the user encountered and even suggest solutions.
- Technical diagnostics: Gain deeper technical insights with a dedicated pane that provides network diagnostics and performance data.
Glassbox – a digital experience analytics tool for both mobile and web apps
Glassbox stands out for helping enterprise companies track user behavior across web and mobile apps. It provides tools for recording, replaying, and analyzing user sessions to identify improvement opportunities.
Key features:
- Detailed visualizations: Replay user sessions with rich visualizations of user interactions, including mouse movements, clicks, and scrolls.
- Journey mapping and analysis: Go beyond individual sessions and analyze user journeys across different touchpoints, spot interaction patterns, and create ad-hoc funnels to understand user behavior in specific scenarios.
- Struggle and error-tracking: Boost your conversion rate optimization efforts by flagging friction and errors with ease.
Looking for a session replay tool for enterprises?
The right session replay tool will save debugging time for your IT team, help you understand users better, and equip you to boost the overall user experience.
How do you evaluate your options? As we’ve mentioned, prioritize tools that offer enterprise-level security and can allow you to act on user data without switching to another tool. Userpilot can help! Book a personalized demo today to see how our platform can equip you to track data code-free and optimize your user experience.
Session replay for enterprise FAQs
What is the main purpose of session replay?
A session replay helps you watch user interactions like a movie and gain deep insights that are difficult to obtain with other customer analytics methods.
How do I enable session replay?
Enabling session replay in Userpilot is incredibly easy! It’s available on all plans and can be activated with a simple switch of a button. No complex setup or coding is required.
Looking for a Session Replay Tool for Your Enterprise? Try Userpilot
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