“Put yourself in the customer’s shoes.”
“Create a compelling customer experience.”
“Make it easy for them.”
While all very valid, do you ever sit staring at your credit union website wondering how to put advice like this into practice? Obviously you didn’t set out to build a website that provides a poor or difficult customer experience. In your eyes, your website journey is easy and compelling for your existing and potential credit union members. But the metrics beg to differ.
And while these metrics are key for informing when you need to make changes, the raw numbers alone don’t tell you where the changes need to occur. That kind of information comes from, yes, putting yourself in the customer’s shoes—and session reply software (SRS) allows you to don those sneakers.
What is session replay software?
SRS records user browsing sessions on your website, providing an in-depth look at how people interact with your site. These replays capture mouse movements, clicks, typing, scrolling, etc. to reveal new insights into the user experience. You can see how people attempt to complete a form application, find their routing number, or log in. There are a variety of SRS solutions available, such as SmartLook, HotJar, and FullStory.
Why should you use it?
Recordings and replays are like watching over your user’s shoulder as they navigate your site. You get a front-row seat into the experience of an individual user, and this insight helps you to learn about your audience and how you can improve their experience. Take a look at some of the benefits of using SRS.
1. Increase conversion rates.
First and foremost, reviewing session replays allows you to improve the performance of your website so you can increase the percentage of visitors who take a desired action. Session replays help you identify why users are or aren’t converting. McKinsey research shows that two-thirds of the decisions customers make are informed by their experiences interacting with your brand. So providing a positive experience can result in more members for your credit union.
2. Discover where people get stuck in the funnel.
By watching a user’s experience on your website firsthand, you can see where drop offs occur. You can find those areas of frustration for the user, which makes session replays especially helpful for UX designers. After all, good designs are seldom noticed, but bad UX readily causes annoyance. For example, users can capture “error clicks” (when a user can’t complete a specific task) and “rage clicks” (when a user angrily clicks a certain element multiple times). Both signal opportunities to make changes, and by fixing these areas of friction, you increase the chances of users moving on down the funnel instead of giving up halfway through.
3. Identify bugs.
Regardless of how talented your engineering team is, bugs are nearly inevitable, especially when you have website visitors using different devices and browsers to peruse your site. Session replays allow you to identify bugs on your website much more quickly and determine how to resolve them without asking for details on what exactly went wrong. This data also helps your customer support team understand user’s predicaments and respond without asking for screenshots or additional information.
4. Test and enhance specific website elements.
When you add a new feature to your website, you want to know if it’s making a positive impact. Session replays allow you to understand feature adoption, observing how users interact with it and what they use it for. These observations inform how to refine the feature to make it the most useful for visitors. Session replays allow you to really dig into specific website elements based on real data rather than mere speculation.
5. Make informed decisions
Session replays are helpful across your team, as UX designers, engineers, marketers, and others can all glean valuable information that can guide their next steps. Comparing session replays also allows you to showcase the effectiveness of your work once you decide where to focus your efforts.
Session replay in action
We used Session Replay Software to better understand the user experience on voyagefcu.org. By watching replays and taking notes as we did so, we came up with actionable insights to help us improve the overall website experience and encourage visitors to become credit union members. Here are some of our observations and learnings:
- Observation: Visitor on a mobile device hit “Back” while filling out the application form but appeared to do so by accident.
- Learning: Put the “Back” button below “Next.”
- Observation: Visitor dropped off after reaching the Employer Info step in the application
- Learning: Think about whether someone needs to be employed to open an account (i.e. consider stay-at-home moms).
- Observation: Visitors take a long time on the “country” dropdown field.
- Learning: Default to the United States.
- Observation: Visitors navigated to the lead capture page and then left.
- Learning: Visitors need to be ready to sign up and should be able to easily navigate away if they are not yet ready to take that step.
We learned quite a bit just from watching these replays—insights we never could have gleaned from metrics alone.
Combining session replay data with your usual quantitative data provides the broad view you need to truly understand your users and the experience they are looking for. These unique insights arm you with the data you need to empathize with users and optimize your credit union website to gain new members.