How session replay enhances a Voice-of-Customer program.

Kristi Olson has expertise in the role of session replay as it relates to customer feedback and its importance as the first step in augmenting visibility into the customer journey. She has designed and evolved the Digital Customer Experience and Voice of Customer (VOC) program at Deluxe, a small business financial services company. The organization incorporates Quantum Metric’s session replay capabilities as one facet of the DCXVOC program, but also relies on the technology to identify and quantify the financial impact of friction points to better prioritize opportunities.

Q: You stood up the Digital Customer Experience + Voice of Customer (VOC) program at Deluxe. What were some immediate challenges you identified? What about initial wins?

Olson: It was clear to me that there were opportunities. There are two different voice-of-customer mechanisms: a feedback button and an intercept survey. The feedback button is about getting that low-hanging fruit in real time. Customers might have some kind of struggle and instantly submit something like, “Hey, your website stinks because I can’t get through your checkout” or “It’s not accepting my credit card. It keeps giving me errors.” So the feedback button is  designed for “yes, please come complain to us.” Through the intercept survey, you can identify experience metrics — longitudinal kinds of things that you want to be tracking around a customer’s experience through the journey. 

When you first launch the Voice of Customer digital analytics program, you immediately start getting low-hanging fruit. You get the “find and fix” errors, which keep you busy for a while. And then within time, you get to the big issues and ask, “Now, what do we fix these deeper systemic issues?” Identifying deeper systemic issues that would require significant transformation become the new challenge. 

Q: What’s in your DCX/VOC tool stack today?

Olson: Qualtrics and Quantum Metric, but it’s the integrations that are powerful.  This includes Adobe. There is bidirectional sharing between each: Qualtrics-Quantum Metric, Quantum Metric-Adobe, Qualtrics-Adobe.  We are rapidly identifying use cases for building and advancing the integrations. Ultimately, the integrations allow us to marry customer sentiment and satisfaction with their behaviors.

A lot of times it starts with the customer expressing a sentiment. Then you need to put that sentiment in the right context to fully understand the impact… it doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of people are having an issue or it’s persistent or ongoing, or that we’re losing a lot of dollars from it. So it’s just the starting point, the tip of the iceberg — somebody gave us a clue, and now we have something to start with. 

So now with the Quantum Metric and Qualtrics integration, every one of my feedback buttons and intercept surveys has a session replay link to understand the user’s perspective and then we also get that context in Quantum Metric in terms of quantifying business impact. That visibility from the session replay though is the key starting point of adoption for all stakeholders within your organization. When I start a conversation about the program with a stakeholder, I call that cohesive view a “VOC closed-loop replay,” which is the first step in building a robust program for new implementations. Even pushing adoption across so many different parts of the organization, people can immediately connect by viewing the session replay. And it’s really hands on. It’s quick, direct, powerful.

Q: How does session replay facilitate taking action on customer feedback? 

Olson: You’re going to have that feedback button where your customers are complaining. And we all know that’s not a representation of everybody — that’s not a representation of an appropriate sample size. So we start with that, click on that link, go to the session replay, and watch it. What did they experience? There might be a couple of paths you could take from there based on the quantification of business impact that Quantum Metric measures. One would be that you want to conduct a root cause analysis to determine if something deeper is going on from a technical standpoint. 

Or another path might be that you can see where the user couldn’t really figure out what was clickable on the page — it might look clickable, but it’s not. So they kept clicking on the element, and it didn’t take him to where they needed to go. How many people actually did that? Once you have the session replay, you can identify “It was these two pieces right here that suggest to us a user might be having a problem.” Or if somebody is on a product detail page (PDP) and rage clicks, we think “Let’s review abandonment cart values. Let’s see the rate of abandonment for people who rage click on that PDP versus people who don’t.” We start to do those kinds of analyses to tease out how big of a problem it is. 

Session replay is the first step, but it’s critical to then have a platform that can quantify an issue while understanding how it’s changed over time by following the trend and then tying it to a business impact.

Also, we are recently starting to evolve in the customer service space where reps are able to proactively determine root cause analysis of a customer’s complaint submitted through VoC with a link to the customer’s session replay.  Imagine the delight a customer experiences when the rep calls them back, expressing empathy and offering a solution to their problem. This is an opportunity not just for recovery of a sale, but also of the customer’s brand sentiment. 

On February 23, 2021, Kristi is going to dive deep on her CX program and how she leverages her CX stack across Deluxe. It’s a great opportunity to learn pragmatic lessons about rolling out, managing, and evolving a CX program. Please register here for this webinar.