Magic Moments

How important is customer experience?

“An amazing customer experience is a web company’s most effective lever for increasing sales through word of mouth, improving conversion rates, and reducing churn,” says Scott Voigt, founder and CEO of FullStory.

Everyone aspires to deliver a good customer experience, but how do you know it’s working? It’s really hard to accurately measure, and that’s exactly why FullStory exists. “Our goal is to help companies have 100% confidence that they are giving 100% of their customers an amazing experience.”

This obsession doesn’t only inform the product FullStory is building. It completely animates how the team works. The way FullStory delivers an amazing experience is by creating “magic moments” for their customers.

What is a Magic Moment?

FullStory’s product captures every user interaction on your website, which can then be evaluated through a high-fidelity session playback and event-level analysis. That sounds pretty cool, but seeing is believing.

“Everything changes when a customer watches that first session,” Voigt explains. “It’s like taking the blindfold off. You can finally see the behavior behind churn, conversion, bounces, etc. It truly is a magic moment for our customers.”

And once the blindfold is off, no one wants to put it back on. From that moment, you are hooked.

Making the Magic Happen

When you discover a magic moment, the goal should be to remove any friction between the customer and that experience. “We realized this was the linchpin in our funnel,” says Voigt. “Our growth efforts became laser-focused on getting more users to watch their first session.”

FullStory found that requiring prospects to schedule a live demo with a sales rep added an unnecessary step in the customer journey. “We had inadvertently made it harder to experience the magic moment, so we pulled the plug on our initial sales effort.”

Today the sales page is decidedly anti-sales. It puts the product front-and-center.

“If you ask us for a demo, we’re happy to do a demo for you. But before we do, we’ll suggest you just try the product. A lot of times, that eliminates the need for a demo at all,” Voigt says.

Navigating a Common Roadblock

It’s easy to install any website tool these days. We’ve all heard the vendors say, “It’s a single line of JavaScript!” Easy in theory, but harder in practice because installing your new pet tool isn’t always number one on your engineers’ priority list.

Sounds like a magic moment roadblock.

That’s why FullStory created Replay which lets you create and share FullStory session recordings via a free Chrome extension. “Replay lets our users experience the product and watch the playback without having to install our code snippet,” Voigt explains. “We’re trying to create a tractor beam that pulls them into the magic moment.”

Btw, I just used Replay to record a quick session of myself visiting the OpenView Labs website which you can see here.

Repeat Magic

While seeing the first session playback helps get a customer hooked, it’s even more powerful to start solving problems with FullStory. There are unique magic moments for users across support, product, design and engineering.

Think of the support use case. Being able to investigate a support ticket with the help of FullStory leads to much faster resolution. An agent doesn’t have to ask clarifying questions because they can immediately see exactly what the user saw. Eliminating the back-and-forth and easily delighting a customer is a magic moment for the support agent.

The magic trickles down from there. If the support agent discovered a bug, that FullStory session gets sent to the product team who in turn passes it to engineering. No more bug hunting. Everyone’s job was made easier – magic moments all around.

Making Growth More Human

At it’s core, the “magic moment” isn’t a new concept. Delivering value to users is the ultimate goal of any good software product. And everyone wants to do it quickly – that’s why there’s so much chatter about “time to value” these days. But that term doesn’t give anyone warm and fuzzies. It feels sterile and mechanized – like the user’s experience is a variable to be optimized.

Recasting “customer value” as “magic moments” isn’t just more user-centric. It’s more human.