Do you have a flight recorder on your website?

Guest blog post by John Thompson, CEO, User Replay

Commercial aircraft have carried flight recorders for over 50 years. These devices do not prevent crashes directly, but their invaluable data enables technical bugs to be fixed, improving safety for us all. Knowing what actually happened also resolves disputes about liability and compensation. Like a damaged airplane, a crashed website cannot talk back, and often leaves few clues as to what happened. When a web transaction goes wrong this lack of audit trail creates disputes, particularly on financial services sites where transactions may have significant value.

Similarly, if a recording is made of all user interactions with a website, errors can be found and fixed. Bugs on sites often go unreported, but they damage conversion rates and customer experience significantly. Who has not been scared away by a 404 error? Bugs can be very elusive and hard to replicate because they are often triggered by a complex combination of circumstances. It is therefore important to record them at the time they happen so they can be replayed both visually in screen shots and at the level of the underlying code.

A recording of web journeys also helps with disputes. “Yes you did buy the fund that went down, and here is a slide show of screenshots of you doing it.” We wouldn’t contemplate not recording telephone conversations when selling financial products, or having a bank branch without a CCTV, but we are happy to trade millions through websites with only the most rudimental log files recording events.

Recording all transactions on a website is now relatively straight forward technologically. The technology is known as ‘session replay’ and there are a number of excellent vendors. In Econsultancy’s 2012 Report on Customer Struggle, 57 per cent of respondents recognised that session replay is very effective but only 17 per cent had it implemented on their sites. Maybe session replay is a technology whose time has come?

Certainly Cofunds has achieved great results with this technology as you can see here: http://www.userreplay.com/resources/cofunds_case_study