Bazaarvoice - Case Study

Background

Bazaarvoice, Inc. provides solutions for brands that help organizations understand and leverage the voice of the customer. The company offers its solutions through a software as a service platform, which enables customers to capture, manage, and display online consumer-generated content, including ratings and reviews, photos, Q&As, videos, seller’s ratings and more. In the Bazaarvoice Network, half a billion end-users view and share content across 6,000+ brand and retail websites monthly. Founded in 2005, Bazaarvoice is headquartered in Austin, Texas with offices in North America, Europe, and Australia.

Sessionstack records sessions for Bazaarvoice

With exceptional customer service, it was unthinkable for Bazaarvoice to have unsatisfied customers during the SSO migration phase.

Challenge

The Team

The Bazaarvoice R&D department is made up of cross-functional teams, including developers, QA, DevOps, UX, and Product Managers. The Portal Team within the R&D department was tasked with re-architecting the entire Bazaarvoice client-facing management system in order to bring its technology stack up-to-date with modern web technologies. One major part of this project was developing a common login and permissioning functionality (Single sign-on) across all their client-facing tools. To do this, the Portal Team had to design a user migration workflow for all existing Bazaarvoice users including consolidation of their accounts and setting up a new set of access credentials.

The Portal Team’s Concern

The project was deemed business-critical as the final result would impact the entire user base all at once. Inferior usability, errors and crashes can severely deteriorate user experience and client stickiness with the platform, impairing their ability to fully utilize the platform capabilities. In short, a hiccup in the user migration process might have led to unsatisfied users and lost business. Not unexpectedly, during the pilot of the user migration tooling project, there were users who experienced problems with migrating their accounts.

When encountering strange behavior, users were unable to effectively describe all the steps that they took or the screens that they saw“, remembers Jennifer Garcia, Staff Software Engineer at Bazaarvoice. “It was really difficult for the team to understand how the user got in the state they did and isolate the bug or issue in the migration workflow.

When you’re able to watch the user’s on-screen journey and see where they click, how many times they try something, and how exactly they run into errors, you’re able to derive some real valuable insights which inform areas for improvement. Since the tool showed real user behavior, something we had not seen before as a team, it immediately gained our trust as a valuable source of user research, as well as a valuable customer support tool.

Team Member on the Portal Team

Solution

The Portal Team was already using Sentry to log errors. The fact that they could seamlessly pair Sentry with SessionStack to recreate sessions for every single crash and issue directly in the Sentry dashboard played a major role in the team’s decision to choose SessionStack. Integrating SessionStack was easy and smooth. The Portal Team managed to install SessionStack into their application in less than 5 minutes. It was critical that SessionStack provided the ability to filter and exclude sensitive information from recordings so that the application and user credentials remained secure through the migration process. The Portal Team worked closely with SessionStack to ensure that sensitive values were masked and record authorization information was never recorded. The simplicity of integration, the responsiveness of the SessionStack’s team, and the product ability to provide good insight into user behavior were the factors that compelled the Portal team to adopt SessionStack and start using it.

The responsiveness of the team to resolve the inquiries we have has made SessionStack a great vendor that we utilize and look forward to continuing to work with”, explains Jenifer Garcia. “I remember there was one issue [that we experienced] which required a hotfix, and the team was able to release the update to production in less than 24 hours.

Results

Since implementing SessionStack 7 months ago, the Bazaarvoice R&D Portal Team has been using the tool on a regular basis to improve user experience, analyze product feature use, reproduce defects faster, and resolve customer issues with confidence.

Cross-functional teams used SessionStack on a daily basis to ensure problem-free SSO migration for the Bazaarvoice users.

Support team resolves customer issues faster:
- The user migration to a Bazaarvoice SSO account presented a significant challenge to the support team, with over 6 000 registered website users across 6 continents successfully completing migration in 3 weeks. As issues were reported by users during migration, the support team was able to see in the recorded sessions the steps that they followed leading to the errors, thus reducing the time needed to resolve the issue.
Enhanced user experience:
- During the migration to a new Bazaarvoice SSO account, the team used SessionStack to understand user behavior and how easy/difficult it was for customers to successfully complete their account migration. This helped the Portal Team take informed software improvement decisions despite the very patchy feedback they received from pilot users. The Portal engineers and UX experts joined efforts to select only events they were interested in so that UX experts could analyze user behavior.
- Oftentimes, the team doesn’t have the time or resources to conduct an adequate user research before building and releasing a new feature. SessionStack helps them take data-bound decisions on the development, launch and phase out of product functionality.
Significantly advanced defect reproduction:
- Thanks to SessionStack’s ability to record each user’s session, the QA team can immediately see the steps the user took that led to an issue, trimming down the time needed to pinpoint a defect while testing.
- Every engineer on the Portal Team uses SessionStack for debugging. They particularly take advantage of the Sentry – SessionStack integration to play the recorded session associated with each error in Sentry. This helps them to understand the severity of the issue better and to prioritize errors that matter depending on how business-critical their impact is and how much it affects the user.

“SessionStack has been valuable to the entire R&D organization [here at Bazaarvoice]. Not only did we use it to gain confidence in a business-critical new workflow and ensure a smooth and painless transition to a unified, single sign-on for the entire user base, we managed to leverage it to demonstrate internally to all Bazaarvoice employees the value that SSO brings to our clients”, added Jenifer Garcia. “The team utilized a SessionStack recording at our All-Hands meeting to show how a user consolidated 130 of her accounts during the migration process which tremendously improved her experience with the Platform”.

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Bazaarvoice ensures a smooth, defect-free user base migration to an SSO with SessionStack