Replaying visitor sessions can provide insight into what leads to a customer sale, or what might cause a customer to abandon their visit. The information you gather from replaying and analyzing visitor sessions can be passed along to your website designers and business strategists, so that they can improve the parts of the website that resulted in visitor pain points or frustration.
The Tealeaf Portal provides a means to search for and replay user sessions within a browser. It provides a variety of options for creating dashboards, scorecards, and reports.
Searching session data
Before you can replay sessions or analyze session data, you must search for the session. For active sessions, you can search for text strings. For completed sessions, you can search for specific types of information, such as form field values, that are not yet indexed in active sessions.
Replaying sessions
Replay is a powerful tool for understanding your customer's experience. When you use the Portal to search, you see a list of sessions matching your search criteria. Select a session and launch a replay. With Replay, you can see the actual web pages served up to the visitor, the links the visitor clicked on, and the form fields the visitor edited as they traversed your website. Replay also provides the HTTP request data that was sent from the visitor's browser and the actual HTML returned by the web server. The Browser Based Replay (BBR) feature also provides Page Load Details so that administrators can troubleshoot technical issues relating page loading.
Example
You are a typical analyst and you are using Tealeaf to analyze visitor sessions. You have a specific customer name or error message and a specific time, and you want to see the replay of the visitor's session. You use the search feature to enter the parameters: the visitor's name and time range. Tealeaf displays a list of all sessions that match the search parameters. From this list, you select a session for replay.
You probably start with the first page and quickly go through the visitor's pages to get a feel for what the visitor was trying to accomplish. From this overview, you can locate the particular piece of the session of interest, where you examine the visitor's behavior, the selected pages, and the values that are entered into the page's form fields.
You can research a reported error and determine whether the error is because of a mistake by the visitor or a problem with the web application. If it is a problem with the web application, you can then search for similar occurrences of the same error. Is this error affecting only a few visitors? Or many? Is it occurring at specific times of day? Or only on specific web servers? Or only for specific combinations of user inputs?
After you identify the problem with the web application and any potential causes, you can communicate this information to the application development team. You can add an annotation to the visitor's session in the Tealeaf CX datastore and send this session to the application developers by email, by copying and pasting into an application, or by attaching the session file to a bug tracking report.
Session search
Tealeaf provides two methods of searching for sessions. Both search methods are accessed through the Tealeaf Portal.
- Database search: As soon as Tealeaf detects a new session, it is accessible for search through the Tealeaf cxReveal database. Based on session attributes, such as the user login identifier, you can search for individual sessions as soon as they are detected by Tealeaf.
- Canister search: Tealeaf cxReveal users can be enabled to complete session searches against the Canisters. This search method is most useful for exploratory searches.
- When you search for sessions, you select a search template and then modify the search options and fields for your specific search.
- After you run a search, Tealeaf cxReveal provides several methods for analyzing search results and finding the appropriate search sessions.
Note: Search the database for more immediate and more efficient searches for sessions. Searching for sessions through the Canisters must be reserved for generalized searches that cannot be easily satisfied by session attribute search.
Session attribute search
Using a search template of Tealeaf cxReveal type, you can specify values for session attributes, such as the visitor's login ID, on which to search for their sessions.
Note: Searching for session attributes requires the installation of the Tealeaf cxReveal database and additional configuration.
Depending on your web application and how Tealeaf is configured to monitor it, these session attributes can be defined by Tealeaf event at any time during the session. For more information, contact your administrator.
CX Mobile
Use the Tealeaf CX Mobile modules to capture, replay, and analyze the experiences of visitors who access your web application from mobile devices. Through Tealeaf CX Mobile, you can monitor the mobile user experience with the same Tealeaf suite of analysis tools that are used for visitors on desktop systems.
Tealeaf provides mobile user experience information that gives you visibility into mobile user success and failure:
- Detect obstacles or issues without relying on user feedback
- Understand usage by mobile devices across the user base, site, and apps
- Identify cause without updating or relaunching services
- See usage patterns across the entire user base
Mobile session search and replay: Tealeaf CX Mobile captures the complete set of interactions of every mobile visitor. You can replay captured mobile web and mobile app sessions in a browser-level recording by using Browser-Based Replay. Session replay for mobile devices accounts for browser capabilities, screen sizes, and other characteristics of the device and its browser.
- Support for mobile-specific actions such as orientation change and swipe
- Render in replay by using screen dimensions, known device characteristics, and orientation
Mobile visitor and device metrics: Tealeaf CX Mobile enables detailed data capture on mobile visitors and their devices. Usage statistics and trending patterns can be monitored through provided reports. You can also create ad hoc visitor segments that are based on mobile attributes such as device manufacturer, operating system, screen resolution, and more.
Browser based replay
Browser Based Replay runs entirely within the Portal and requires no additional software installation for Tealeaf users. BBR is an alternative to CX RealiTea Viewer (RTV) desktop application, which must be installed on each user's desktop system as an advanced search and replay system.
You can use BBR to complete the following functions:
- Replay visitor sessions or track live visitor sessions as they occur.
Replaying active sessions as they occur enables you to provide real-time customer support for customers and to diagnose web application issues that you are personally experiencing.
- Show visitor input, such as entered text, selected menu options, and clicked links or buttons.
- Track activities that occur on different views of a dynamic page.
- View the raw request and response data.
- Drill down into session details.
CX RealiTea Viewer (RTV)
CX RealiTea Viewer (RTV) is a stand-alone application that is part of the Tealeaf cxImpact product suite. The Tealeaf cxImpact product is used to capture and preserve the detailed information about every visitor's interaction with your web application.
RTV provides the following perspectives on session data:
- Replay View: Experience a visitor's session as the visitor experienced it.
- Request View: Review the requests that are submitted by the visitor's browser to the web server during the session.
- Response View:Review the responses that are returned from the web server to the visitor's browser during the session.
The Tealeaf Event Manager is closely integrated with the RTV request and response playback views, which allows easy visual identification of patterns that can be used to create events.