July 03, 2020
by Tony Hou
The best way to understand how your customers behave on your website is to literally watch them interact with it. I use a tool called Fullstory to do exactly that.
Fullstory records all of the customer interactions on your website by capturing the javascript events that take place. It then allows you to replay those sessions to see exactly what your customer is doing and how they are interacting with your website.
I’ve been using Fullstory for two purposes.
1: Troubleshooting
The first purpose is troubleshooting. If you run an eCommerce site, sometimes you will get complaints from your customers saying how their coupon code does not work, or they can’t add something to the cart.
For you or your developer to understand and fix the issue, you’ll need to know exactly what happened on your customer’s screen. Fullstory will help with this as you can find that customer’s session and see what they experienced.
2: Improved Customer Experience
The second purpose is to improve your customer’s experience. The way I use it is to create several customer segmentations based on their behaviour. Then I set aside some time each week to go through the most important segmentations.
The most important segment that I always keep an eye on is the “abandoned cart” segment. These are the customers who add at least one product to the shopping cart, but don’t end up purchasing it. Understanding why your customers abandon their cart will allow you improve your checkout process and address any issues. Ultimately, this should improve your conversion rate.
The Verdict
Fullstory is a powerful tool where you can gather a lot of valuable information. I’ve been using it for most of my eCommerce sites for some time now. If you have a limited budget and don’t want to use Fullstory on a day to day basis, you could just use it when you launch major changes to your site. That way, you can see how your customers are responding to the changes and address any issues as they come out.
by Tony Hou