And that’s exactly the kind of value a lot of companies are getting from Smartlook. So let’s look at one of them.
The company
Disivo is a SaaS tool that helps e-commerce stores to significantly improve revenue. It optimizes pricing based on various inputs like product performance, the current situation on the market and price of the competition.
It can do a lot. Really. Just imagine changing prices for hundreds of thousands of products at once.
Pricing is a sensitive topic. And the team working on Disivo understands how crucial it is to quickly find and fix any problems users might be experiencing in the app.
The problem
“We would often hear: ‘I did exactly what you told me and it didn’t work.’ And we needed to know if our users really followed our instruction and if it was a technical issue,” says Petr Blaha, CEO of Disivo.
Disivo uses various monitoring tools. Like Sentry. And internal logs. So even before Smartlook they could look into those and have a rough idea of what any user did.
But it’s not ideal. When you see the order of actions in a log file? You don’t get a good understanding of how someone behaved.
“Sometimes, people need to fix prices for certain products that are part of a special offer. So they can do that quite easily by setting up which products’ prices should be fixed,” explains Blaha.
A pattern would emerge. Those clients would often say that their settings weren’t reflected in the actual pricing.
So the team needed to check what’s happening.
Before Smartlook that would mean going to programmers and have them check logs. Developers would spend an hour on it. Maybe two. “When it wasn’t a technical issue it turned out to be a huge waste of time,” points out Blaha.
And that’s just one example.
Another common problem was when people used the export prices function.
The team behind Disivo always recommends checking at least a few dozen products to make sure that the prices are correct.
And they would get complaints. Remarks about the function not working properly.
The solution that brought ROI 400%
Disivo chose to monitor these situations with Smartlook’s events.
“People spend a lot of time in our app. A session is often between 20-50 minutes long and without events, it would be extremely hard to figure out what parts of the recording we need to look at.”
So? Disivo created a bunch of events for business-critical moments. Such as approval of data export. Manual changes to pricing. And saves of a pricing strategy.
The company used a combination of events tied to a visited URL and clicks on buttons with unique CSS selectors. Events were then used to filter recordings where those business-critical moments happen.
And watching them made a couple of things obvious.
“We’ve discovered that people aren’t telling us the truth. Not that they would lie on purpose… but they would often say they did exactly what we told them to while in reality, they didn’t follow our instructions,” says Blaha.
People usually skip the approval phase. Entirely. The whole thing.
Instead, they just click on the prices export function.
Smartlook-Events-Breakdown
“We’ve seen that people don’t bother checking even the first 20 or 30 products. That confirmed our suspicion that they don’t read anything before exporting the data”, Blaha describes his observations.
So Smartlook now helps the team to troubleshoot a lot of problems without developers.
“We just watch a recording to see what a user did and in what order. And we talk to developers only when we can’t figure out the source of a problem,” explains Blaha.
Blaha is also quick to point out that developers’ time is extremely expensive.
“When I think about how much of developers’ time I am saving with Smartlook I am easily around 300-400% ROI. And that’s just for the devs. Once your support team starts using Smartlook, ROI goes up even more,” Blaha says with a smile.
That’s quite an ROI. And the reason why Smartlook is now an essential part of Disivo’s tools.
“Sometimes we’re in shock when we see how much better could be the design of some of the functions. Especially when a user takes an action 3 times and still fails. Smartlook really helps our team to create a better product,” concludes Blaha.
