Who is this e-commerce giant?

In the Czech Republic, Alza basically represents a synonym for an electronics e-shop. It is the biggest e-shop of its kind in this region and approximately 22nd biggest in the world (October 2020). For years now, the shop is much more than just electronics. It also serves as a platform for buying toys, bikes, tools, books, or even cosmetics.

It was founded as Alzasoft in 1994 and became a leader on the Czech market in 2008. In 2014, Alza decided to expand other European markets such as Germany, Austria, Hungary and Great Britain. In the year 2017, Alza tried to give it’s brand a futuristic flair by selling Tesla cars and allowing customers to pay in Bitcoins. It is also known for supporting more than 80 NGOs.

Last year, Alza continued in its rapid growth:

What was the mission?

Alza represents a business so large, that processing all the analytical data alone is creating a challenge in itself. There are millions and millions of visits every month. Managers, marketers and designers in Alza have to handle terabytes of analytics coming from different server structures. On top of that, every country is dealt with as a stand-alone project.

Alza is trying out several analytical tools, some of them very renowned, but in the end, none of them seemed to fit.

How did things change with Smartlook

„Thanks to implementing Smartlook, our UX department is now much more independent. We are fully capable of carrying out analytics on our own, no need to send requests to dev and wait the whole week or longer for results. What a relief.“
Lukáš Hadamčík, UX&UI Lead

Before Smartlook

Google Analytics runs the show. Although this tool is allowing very precise quantitative analysis, it can also be tediously slow in this setting. If some of the department decided to set up a new event, for instance, it would take up to a week or even several weeks to have the data ready and initiate the analysis. If they did miss out a specific parameter, they had to wait another week to adjust the event or a funnel. In one instance, it took so long to get results, that the analysis was no longer valuable for the team member requesting data. Analysing specific parts of the web is resembling lengthy detective work because there is no option how to select particular occurrences quickly.

In this fast-paced setting of the e-commerce electronics business, Alza experts were trying to find a more flexible tool.

Then, unexpectedly, Alza found itself an analytical partner from the same country. Alza met Smartlook for the first time during a marketing festival in the spring of 2019. To cut this story short, Alza tried out a premium package a couple of months later and has stayed loyal to Smartlook ever since.

Smartlook is moving in

Things were about to become much smoother when Smartlook moved in with Alza. They still worked with Google Analytics a lot, but Smartlook quickly became a sweetheart for quickly testing out a new design or new segment of goods.

Integrating Smartlook in the company was fairly easy. Every department got access to the app and also was advised to go through Smartlook School. Professionals at Alza are smart cookies, and the Smartlook interface is very intuitive, so nobody ever requested any formal training.

The considerable advantage of Smartlook was the option of filtering visitors that are tracked. Instead of trying to make sense out of tens of thousands of sessions, experts in the company could now watch 10 or 20 sessions to grasp the problem. Using only a small part of all session recordings is saving money and time for many people in the company.

Extremely useful when testing a new UI design, Smartlook allows users to zoom in on specific events quickly. All the user has to do is to filter recordings for a particular event. Then, a first customer session is opened in the player just a couple of seconds before the event. Instead the whole X minutes, you will spend the only couple of seconds of your precious time. Nice-to-have when handling your average small eshop, but absolutely critical when analysing this multi-million dollar enterprise.

Another significant improvement consisted of retroactive events and funnels. Smartlook is collecting data continuously. That means tracking events is automated and without the need to turn anything on, the tools will start filling your storage ( Have you ever seen a hungry pac-man?). When you open a specific event, a button on the shopping cart for instance, historical data will be ready for you right away.

Who has the closest relationship to Smartlook

Product manager

Toolkit: Recordings player, event manager, funnels

What is the every-day struggle?

Product managers need to know if everything in the product works as it was designed. A good product manager is also an observer. He or she can understand customers and separate them into groups. Based on the right insight, a product manager should come up with new features or prioritize the current development of the web or an app.

How is a product manager using the tools:

A product manager can define various events which need to be observed, create funnels over these events and then check the conversion rate of each funnel. Then he or she can just simply use these funnels to see only the relevant recordings and analyse the user behaviour. For a product manager, it’s priceless to observe users on the recordings in action.

UX designer

Toolkit: Recordings player

What is the every-day struggle?

A UX expert should, above all, listen to the customer and feel his/hers behaviour. A good designer can make the whole customer journey effortless and intuitive. They should identify components of a website that are too hidden or too difficult to understand.

And in the first place, they should always be on the watch for that irritating stuck button; in case people are clicking furiously without success (hence „rage clicks“).

How is a UX designer using the tools:

A/B testing is an excellent method of how to figure out if a design is working. But not that much when you ask why is that so. Recordings make designers literally see where the issue is. Watching a specific user will give the UX designer that unique insight which is hard to get with numbers only.

Segment manager

Toolkit: Heatmaps

What is the every-day struggle?

A segment manager has to care about specific segments of the e-shop. It could be fridges or stoves, it could be computer games, it could be real cars. The Segment department is also coming up with valuable ideas for the content departments, such as product guides.

How is a segment manager using the tools:

With heatmaps, segment specialists will see very quickly where people click the most. That way, they can determine which drop-down menus or buttons should come first and where.

Content specialist

Toolkit: Heatmaps

What is the every-day struggle?

Content specialists are managing displayed information on websites, blogs, video-channels and others. In a large e-shop like Alza, the big challenge is to optimise specific elements on the page, so the most important info is ready at hand for the customer.

How is a content specialist using the tools:

More specific, content managers use heatmaps to watch which details of the page are getting the most attention. If an element doesn’t get enough attention, they have to collaborate with UX to create a better flow. On the other hand, it’s important to ensure that customers are not flooded with unnecessary details.

Why does Alza like Smartlook?

● No need to send requests to dev.
● You can filter specific events in recordings.
● They can’t get enough of our heatmaps.

And why Smartlook likes Alza

● They have trusted our young company with their enormous business.

author Petr Vecek

Content Manager

The post Alza.cz: World’s Top 30 ranked E-shop finally found a long-term analytical partner appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

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.

author Andrej Brabec

CRO specialist

The post How events in Smartlook brought ROI 400% appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

What do you use Smartlook for?

Here at Kiwi.com, we use Smartlook to verify bugs and issues that our customers report. It also helps us evaluate A/B test results, and our UX research team uses it to understand customer behavior better.

Which teams in your company use Smartlook?

Testers on our quality assurance team mainly use Smartlook. Our task is testing the Kiwi.com flight booking portal to improve the user experience. We review bugs and user experience-related issues and report them to our development and UX teams.

If a support representative receives a ticket from a customer and believes it’s related to a bug or an issue with the interface, they report it to our quality assurance team. We then analyze it further and watch Smartlook video recordings of the customer involved to see what exactly happened. 

If we confirm it is a bug or a UX issue, we report it to the appropriate team and send them a link to the customer’s recording in Smartlook. Sometimes, the UX team uses Smartlook directly to analyze A/B test results and to determine how new features are used.

What problem does Smartlook help you solve?

Smartlook allows us to verify customer issues in a way that wasn’t previously possible. When a customer reports an issue, it’s often difficult to analyze what exactly happened based solely on logs or a customer’s brief description. Customers will often say things like, “Your booking page doesn’t work, so I wasn’t able to book a flight,” without providing details. 

Now, we can simply watch a video recording of that particular customer in Smartlook to see exactly what happened and identify the issue right away. Thanks to Smartlook, we’ve improved bug-detection and UX issues and can now achieve faster case resolution times.

There is also an additional collateral value to Smartlook — while watching recordings of particular customers to review an issue they reported, we often discover unrelated UX issues. 

For example, we often notice that customers forget to fill in their title (Mr./Mrs.) while entering their personal info. This results in a form error when the customer attempts to complete their booking. Thanks to Smartlook, we detected this issue and reported it to the UX team, who then improved the interface.

How did you deal with UX issues before?

Our quality assurance team verified customer issues using log files from developers, which often didn’t give us such good insights into customer behavior. The review of customer UX issues was a lengthier process. We didn’t have any evidence for the customer if they were disputing what exactly happened during the flight booking, as the logs were too technical to be used in customer communication.

Can you quantify how Smartlook helps you?

Our QA testers save approximately 8 minutes with each customer issue. We discover roughly 10 bugs per month, which would likely go undetected without Smartlook. 

I also think Smartlook decreases the ticket volume for support as we can solve customer issues faster.

What made you choose Smartlook over other product analytics solutions?

Other products weren’t able to record all visitors because they relied on visitor traffic sampling. Smartlook was the only solution with always-on recording. It was also the only service able to record all elements of our complex website, for example, our dynamic flight search map.

author Vladimír Šandera

Cofounder, optimist

The post Kiwi.com uses Smartlook to verify customer issues appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

What made you start using Smartlook?

Initially, there was some uncertainty and a notion that Smartlook could not deliver the same results as user testing. After watching a few recordings, our attitude changed completely. It turned out that quantity can eventually give us the same data as if a user were to arrive for testing in person.

You tweeted that Smartlook helped you find 15 bugs in three hours! What were they?

We were watching a user trying to log in, and they kept getting a strange error message. I sent the video to our programmers to find out what was causing it. Suddenly, the problem was fixed! The old way to solve this would have been to write an issue and complicatedly simulate the bug. In other videos, we tracked how users would use the search bar on the website and whether they would get relevant results. This is so much more than just looking at statistics. We also discovered that, at a specific moment, it is impossible to enter a review for a discount. It turns out that most people don’t close cookies or social media popups and just leave them open somewhere in a corner.  

Does Smartlook improve your marketing?

Yes. We’ve had arguments about whether certain PPC campaigns are beneficial to customers. Now I have materials that I send to our PPC specialist, and she can see what happens when she directs someone to the wrong landing page. I found out about more issues, but some are internal. We use them more as topics for discussion about what our website visitors do and want.

What are the biggest advantages of Smartlook?

To put it simply, you can track visitors that come via ads. It is also a great tool for testing new features and debugging. We are often surprised to see how visitors use our website.

How will you use Smartlook in the future?

When the user interacts with a new feature that we’re monitoring, we tag them via the Smartlook API. Then, if I search for all users that performed a certain action (e.g., used the “favorite” button), I can look at how they use this feature. There are numerous things you can come up with, but I currently need more time to go through our recordings.

author Petr Janošík

Founder and CEO

The post How Skrz.cz Found 15 Bugs on Its Website in 3 Hours appeared first on Smartlook Blog.