News

Introducing Pendo Session Replay: A new, privacy-first solution to understand user behavior with visual data

Published Oct 18, 2023
Session Replay is now available in Pendo. Session Replay gives product teams access to a new kind of user behavior data—visual data—in the form of video playbacks that illustrate how customers use and experience an application.

One data point that alarms product managers and application owners is that 80% of their product’s features go unused. That’s why having the visual evidence to support what you’ve discovered via product analytics has never been more important. Seeing is still believing. 

For product teams that want to really understand their users and drive change, you’ll need more than quantitative and qualitative data—you need to see what users are actually doing in your app. That visual data is the context, the missing link, between your quantitative and qualitative understanding of user behavior. In other words, it’s the difference between building features that go unused and building product experiences that keep customers coming back for more.

So, what if you could add that visual evidence to support what you’ve discovered via product analytics? What if you could do both from one platform? The addition of Session Replay to Pendo provides exactly that. It’s this combination of usage insights paired with specific reproductions of a user’s in-app experience that product teams need to make the best decisions possible—while convincing everyone else that they’re right, too. 

With Session Replay, the unified Pendo platform becomes even more powerful as your single source of truth for user behavior intelligence. With the visual data to reinforce your quantitative and qualitative understanding of your users, it’s easy to determine, with confidence, the best direction for improving your user experience and ensuring the features you build get used. 

 

Find the right replays, fast

Just like no one has time to connect one-on-one with every single customer, no one has time to watch every single replay. Session Replay leverages Pendo’s rich combination of quantitative and qualitative data so it’s simple to find the right replays needed to solve the problem at hand. By leveraging quantitative user data to search for and draw your attention to high-impact replays, you can get to critical product insights faster.

Data-driven viewing

Quickly narrow down your search for replays based on account and user information, page or feature details, tagging, guide interactions, and more. Plus, you can view replays within the context of critical Pendo data—such as user metadata and filter annotations. And if you’re curious about the aggregate data behind a specific replay, you can jump right to page details or feature details to better understand if this behavior is common across core experiences within your app. Get all the data you need, at your fingertips, to confidently understand the “why” behind the user behavior in your replays so you can improve the user experience. 

Easy access within Pendo

With Session Replay built natively into the unified Pendo platform, you can go from data point to replay in a single click. View the behavior behind the data across In-app Guides, Product Analytics, and heatmaps—with more integrations to come. 

Make more effective and convincing product decisions 

Experienced product people know that success hinges on deeply understanding users, and leveraging that information to influence without authority. It’s how you convince leadership that you need an extra designer or need engineering to take a risk on a new feature. And while product usage data helps product teams make quantifiably better decisions, it can often be left up to interpretation and debate (read: wasted time and little confidence that the right decision has eventually been reached). 

A new kind of evidence: visual data

When it comes to launching or sunsetting a new feature or gathering insights for product discovery, what’s a product team to do if their data is debatable? 

They need to put that data into the context of the individual user experience. Enter: Session Replay. Replays are valuable at every phase of the product development lifecycle. From discovering why users are stuck and evaluating usage after a launch to iterating on legacy features that have low usage and digging into specific segments of users to understand their pains and needs.

Product teams need the visual evidence—the visual data—to get at the “why” behind their users’ behaviors, so they can make the most informed and effective product decision the first time. 

One home for your quant, qual, and the context that connects them 

As of today, Pendo can now offer product teams a truly holistic view of their user behavior—thanks to the quantitative data from Analytics, the qualitative data from NPS and Feedback, and the visual data that ties them together from Session Replay. It’s one home for your user behavior intelligence. 

Save, streamline, and simplify

By eliminating the mental gymnastics of juggling multiple technologies, you also eliminate the added costs of enabling different tools across your organization. Consolidating all your product experience tools and user behavior insights into a unified platform simplifies and streamlines your team’s workflows—eliminating the mental load and additional costs that come with inflated tech stacks. 

A single source of truth

When all your user behavior data lives in one place, it’s not only easier to access, share, and act on—but also easier to trust. With Session Replay, you can see the behavior behind the data, building confidence that the insights you’re acting on are sound and reliable. 

Putting privacy first

We take you and your customer’s privacy seriously. Which is why we offer the most privacy-first session replay solution on the market. With three out-of-the-box privacy settings, it’s easy to get Session Replay up and running without sacrificing on privacy standards. And with the flexibility to customize each privacy setting to your exact needs, you can get that balance of insight and privacy just right. 

 

We’re just getting started: What’s next for Pendo Session Replay

And that’s just the beginning of what Pendo Session Replay will do for product teams. We’re just getting started, with even more amazing innovations right around the corner.

Actionability: To help product teams act even faster on insights from replays, we’ll be developing an alert system to provide recommendations to teams on which replays to view, and what to do to improve the product experience. 

Stronger signals: Replay-specific data points, such as scoring and engagement levels, will help users investigate replays based on the problems they are most concerned about solving. 

Deeper integrations: Session Replay has a role in every stage of the product life cycle, and within every product in the Pendo platform. As we continue to evolve, you’ll see even more touchpoints between Session Replay and our existing (and future!) products within the platform.

We’re excited to give our customers a deeper understanding of their users and unlock the visual evidence they need to influence with ease. Now’s the time to get in early, share your thoughts, and help shape the vision for a better way to replay. 


 

Ready to see Session Replay in action? Schedule a personalized demo and unlock a whole new understanding of user behavior with visual data.