Prior to testing SessionStack, the Tech Tour team also evaluated several other solutions such as Hotjar and Pixpecker. These did not provide the features which the team needed because they were more focused on marketing, website optimization, lead generation, and capture than on product development.

What the team needed instead was to effectively track user behavior across the platform in specific use cases (or workflows) and replay user sessions. SessionStack offered a wider variety of features to address this need, such as very flexible search and session segmentation capabilities.

This allowed Tech Tour to find those users and sessions that would enable them to understand typical user difficulties and work toward improving the usability of the platform in those instances.

Use cases included:

• Customer support

Tech Tour’s customer support is mostly asynchronous. While the support service includes live chat, phone support, and video calls through Webex, Go-To-Meeting, Teams, or Zoom, 80% of the cases requiring support are through email.

The usual way in which a support scenario unfolds is that the staff will receive an email. Often the email will be vague in terms of describing the issue that users run into. At this point, the customer support staff will switch to SessionStack to search the user’s ID and check their session and behavior and understand what causes the issue. Based on the information derived from reviewing the session, support staff can then assist customers in making the most of the product and achieving their goals.

Alternatively, they may establish that the development team needs to have a look at the issue if a user’s difficulty is due to a bug. In that case, they can forward the issue to the development team to reproduce the user session in the demo environment to better establish the issue.

• Customer onboarding and user experience analysis

Tech Tour’s teams also use SessionStack as part of their user experience and onboarding analysis.

The main use case in this area is that of tracking user behavior on existing functionalities. By monitoring behavior, the product team can draft change requests that improve user experience.

This same approach is also used in advance to developing major changes to the product. In those cases, user patterns are closely tracked in order to determine the potential impact of such changes. Repeatedly, this has led the Tech Tour team to reevaluate their idea and take a different course.
Finally, the searching and session review capability of SessionStack is also utilized to measure the usage of Tech Tour’s new functionalities.