Session replay provides the ability to have further insight into how users are interacting with your website. You are able to view a recreated version of their actions and see it as a video, this helps improve your ability to enhance your site by viewing how people are actually interacting with it. While this tool has many advantages to it, it also has a few drawbacks. We will go over the advantages and disadvantages of this tool.
Advantages of Session Replay Tools
Troubleshooting
One of the most important advantages of session replay is the ability to improve your troubleshooting capacity. When an issue appears on your website, this program creates a much easier path to identifying what the actual steps were that occurred before a user encountered a problem. Troubleshooting is a difficult task; it is often hard to identify exactly what happened before an error occurred. This program removes a lot of this guess work by providing the trouble shooter the ability to view exactly what led to the problem. This improved ability to identify problems decreases the time it takes for issues to be resolved and through this improves the overall operation of the site.
Customer Service
Similar to the above advantage, the ability to identify exactly what someone was, and is, doing provides the increased ability to provide support to a customer. You can view exactly what they did by instantly watching their interaction and identifying the choices that were made. Given that the system recreates their actions into a video it enables the individual assisting the customer to view the website exactly how the customer viewed it. This provides a large advantage and removes a sizable portion of the conversation which previously would have needed to be had, thus speeding up the support provided.
Potential Session Replay Disadvantages
Context
While the advantages of the session replay program are valuable, all systems inherently come with some drawbacks. One of these is that it does not provide complete context to the user’s actions, while it does improve contextual awareness far beyond anything we have previously had, it still is not complete. It is still impossible to know exactly why the user made the choices that they did on your website, it offers insights but does not provide any concrete answers.
Privacy
Another drawback of session replay is privacy, while people often agree to many things on their internet without noting what they are agreeing to, terms of service being a common one. Individuals still assume a certain degree of privacy, while many individuals may not view this program as a breech of that privacy, there are some that may. This has the most potential to become an issue when an individual interacts with customer support. While the customer support the user receives will be vastly improved by this program the individual may not be aware of this level of tracking until the interaction with a customer service agent. This has the potential to cause issues if the user is displeased, often due to the lack of knowledge about how the tracking is done or why.