How Shopmonkey uses Pendo Session Replay across their entire organization to improve the customer experience

Shopmonkey is a provider of all-in-one digital solutions that help automotive shops operate at peak performance. Their technology helps auto shops across the United States and Canada work faster and smarter, acquire customers, streamline workflows, manage payments, and more—all from a single, unified platform.

Using analytics, guides, and replays to create a connected ecosystem of user insights

The Shopmonkey team first started using Pendo Analytics and Pendo In-app Guides in early 2020, to identify behavioral trends and guide ideal user behaviors. 

Now, Shopmonkey’s product team is further deepening their understanding of their users—and creating a connected ecosystem of user insights—with the addition of Pendo Session Replay to their subscription. “It’s really getting one step closer to interpreting what the user is actually experiencing,” said Steve Eddy, principal product manager at Shopmonkey. “With Pendo Analytics, [we can see] what is happening and how much is happening. Then, Pendo Session Replay gives us the why.”

Why Shopmonkey made the switch from Hotjar to Pendo Session Replay

Before Pendo Session Replay, Shopmonkey used Hotjar. But the team struggled to find signal in the noise, and were frustrated by the limitations of the replays available to them. “The random sampling [in Hotjar] just didn’t allow us to truly answer the questions we were asking,” Eddy said. “It just didn’t make any sense if we didn’t have access to all of the sessions.”

Eddy explained that one of the biggest draws of Pendo Session Replay was—and continues to be—its seamless integration into the rest of the Pendo platform. “The obvious value that Pendo provides is the direct link between everything that’s already been tagged for analytics, paths, funnels, and guides,” he said. Because every part of the Pendo platform is integrated in a single UI and unified with a single data set, Eddy and his team can now seamlessly move from digging into product usage data to seeing users’ visual journeys—without ever leaving Pendo. “It’s almost like we go looking for outliers in the analytics, and can then jump into the replays to figure out why those outliers are who they are,” Eddy noted.

“The obvious value that Pendo provides is the direct link between everything [in the platform].”

Steve Eddy | Principal Product Manager, Shopmonkey

Five unique ways Shopmonkey uses Pendo Session Replay

In the short time they’ve been using Pendo Session Replay, teams across Shopmonkey have already realized a huge amount of value from using replays alongside product analytics and in-app messaging in Pendo. 

Here are just a few of the innovative ways Shopmonkey is using Pendo Session Replay. 

1. Understanding users’ flow of work between clicks and features

Shopmonkey’s product management and design teams have already gained significant efficiencies by using Pendo Session Replay to better understand how their users move through and between key areas of their products. “Being able to see that mouse movement and quickly understand, ‘Wow, they’re taking three seconds to get to that next button, when it should just be instantly clear,’ [has been super helpful],” Eddy said. 

Eddy also noted that this functionality has been particularly valuable in giving Shopmonkey more granular insights into user paths and funnels. Pendo Session Replay allows his team to see which paths successful users are taking to accomplish specific tasks—and, perhaps more importantly, the steps users who aren’t following desired paths are taking. “[Before], without doing a bunch of user research interviews, we would have no idea,” Eddy noted. “But [with Pendo Session Replay], it’s super easy to get that information, get those insights, and then decide if we’re going to do something.”

2. Ensuring features are tagged correctly

Shopmonkey’s product team has also found that they can use Pendo Session Replay to verify whether features are tagged correctly in their app. Eddy explained that he does this by first looking at the data in Pendo Analytics. If he sees a feature with unusually high or low engagement, he then hops over to the replays associated with that particular feature. “I can jump to where that [feature engagement] happens and verify if that’s [an element] we expected to be tagged or not,” he said.

3. Driving informed product design decisions

On the design side, Eddy noted that Pendo Session Replay has helped his team build a more robust understanding of the user experience—even outside of the Shopmonkey app. “We have the mouse movement, but [also want to understand] what people are doing to their browsers,” he said. 

Using Pendo Session Replay, Eddy is now able to identify factors like whether users’ browser settings or plugin extensions are altering the appearance and functionality of the Shopmonkey app. This information then allows his team to make informed decisions about where they may need to consider these visual discrepancies, or identify opportunities to improve the design of their app to drive a better user experience.

4. Streamlining implementation and onboarding for users

The implementation team at Shopmonkey has also already seen a ton of value from Pendo Session Replay. By watching replays, they can now identify which customers are successfully completing workflows (e.g. filling out auto shop orders)—and if not, where they’re getting stuck.

Similarly, Shopmonkey’s training and enablement team now references replays from Pendo Session Replay to understand how users engage with onboarding and training guides that are delivered via Pendo In-app Guides. With quantitative and visual data now available within the Pendo platform, the team can clearly see the behaviors of the users who interact (or don’t interact) with these guides, the respective engagement associated with them, and the actions users take after seeing the guides. This allows the Shopmonkey team to refine their onboarding and enablement strategy and continuously drive a better user experience.

5. Supercharging customer support

Shopmonkey’s support team has had perhaps the most profound breakthrough with Pendo Session Replay so far. Eddy explained that it has been particularly useful for support reps and engineers who are unable to replicate and diagnose issues customers are bringing to their attention. “Our support team can now go directly to the timeframe when the user said [the issue] happened, and watch exactly what happened,” he said. “They can see if that thing actually happened or how the customer got there—and it removes any personal bias from both the customer and the support rep.”

Eddy noted that using Pendo Session Replay in this way has reduced the open time of these kinds of tickets significantly. “Those tend to be the cases that sit open the longest—[where we’re trying to understand] what is happening and how we reproduce it. Diving in and being able to see [what’s going on] is super helpful,” he said. This has also reduced dependency on Shopmonkey’s development teams. Now, instead of sending every tricky case over to dev or QA, members of the support team can watch replays to diagnose customer challenges on their own—freeing up time in the escalation cycle.

“Back in my early support days, having Pendo Session Replay would have been a superpower.”

Steve Eddy | Principal Product Manager, Shopmonkey

Building buy-in for Pendo Session Replay across the entire organization

As existing Pendo customers, the value of augmenting the quantitative and qualitative data already being collected in their Pendo instance with the visual data from Session Replay was no-brainer for the Shopmonkey team.

Eddy noted that Pendo Session Replay’s wide array of use cases—for teams across the organization—was also an easy sell. “Pendo Session Replay is something that [teams across the business] use enough that we can split this budget across all those teams, and not just tie to the product,” he said. “Because they get so much out of it, they’re more than willing to take that on.” 

Curious to see what Pendo Session Replay can do for teams across your company? See Pendo Session Replay in action for yourself in this self-guided tour, or request a custom demo with our sales team.