When it comes to capturing meaningful insights into your customers’ digital experience, you need to discover and truly understand the ‘unknown unknown’. Naturally if you already knew what you were searching for, you wouldn’t need to look! So, how do you begin to find the needle in the haystack when you don’t know it is a needle you are looking for?

The simple answer is that you need to automatically capture any and every piece of relevant data, be it from your server or your client side. Then, add digital behaviour and customer experience analytics, free-text-search, machine learning/artificial intelligence (AI) and you have a real game changer.

The technology has evolved to a point whereby you can now automatically record, index, replay and analyse every customer session across web and mobile platforms, including anything they see and do (such as curser movements and data entered) – all analysed, stored and compressed automatically. In fact, automatic recording is now a prerequisite for every comprehensive digital transformation programme.

If you don’t automatically record then you automatically miss out

The benefits of automatic recording are plentiful for any organisation with a digital presence, but the most important ones are a minimised time-to-insight and the confidence that you’re always capturing all your data without having to configure or tag anything, even if your website or mobile application has been updated.

Crucially, not all automatic recording systems are made equal and some will only capture data from the client side. However, to ‘see’ the whole picture, server side data is vital. For example, client side recording alone won’t explain errors that are happening only on the server side (i.e. error messages that are generated from the servers), which resulted in abandoned transactions at the checkout. Client-side recording can also be disabled by end customers, which means that it is not tamper proof and can’t be used for Compliance purposes.

If you don’t have the full picture it is very difficult, if not impossible, to fully analyse these potentially costly (and often easy to fix) issues and be able to implement relevant fixes and improvements to your service.

How to choose the right automatic recording solution

There is a considerable amount of choice on the market when it comes to digital recording solutions providers, but the many options on offer can actually be significantly narrowed down if you focus on the key goals and require automatic recording.

The vast majority of digital recording solutions require configuration to define exactly what elements need to be captured, recorded and stored. This implies that you already know what you are looking for, but it is often the case that the ‘unknown unknowns’ can deliver the greatest returns.

Investing in a solution which requires your team to tag data or pre-configure information searches, will entail a considerable amount of maintenance each time your website changes or there is an update. Naturally this is costly and time consuming. It also delays your response time to customer needs/demands and your ability to fine tune your offering to the market.

How artificial intelligence/machine learning is delivering automatic insights

With automatic insights, you won’t have to deep dive into huge amounts of data to find the insights you need and to fully understand what is going on. All the anomalies and customer journey struggles will be recorded and your team will be notified automatically.

Automatic recording inevitably means analysing a lot of data in a very short space of time, to ensure you benefit from being able to act in a timely manner. To address this, the other vital part of the equation is artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning and automatic digital customer insights.

Many people that have used what is often referred to as digital behaviour analytics will tell you that they first need to consider the right KPIs and identify what needs to be improved. This allows your organisation to look for any potential issues and to establish the right ‘fix’ to improve the process. With automatic digital customer insights, the system will already know what you are interested in and will provide the right data, without you having to search for it.  It sounds almost like magic, but this is exactly the development path that machine learning has rapidly evolved towards.

Despite the obvious complexity of these systems, the reporting process is surprisingly simple. With alerts from a secure portal or email to your inbox, you will immediately be informed of any potential issues. Then you can easily and rapidly disseminate this information to the right teams, ensuring a resolution is rapid and effective.

Equally, the reporting from a truly insightful digital customer insights solution will also suggest potential reasons for the issue and even possible solutions. From this starting point, it is much easier to dig down through the information, investigate in the right places and understand exactly what is going on.

Knowing the unknown

Behind a complex and undeniably top-notch technology, automatic digital recording is all about understanding the customer pain-points and identifying new opportunities that you would have otherwise missed.

By ensuring you automatically record everything and then using AI to gain the right insights, your business can be more agile and receptive than your competitors – providing all the right ingredients to ensure your customers will neither want, nor need, to look elsewhere.