ClickTale Review 2015

If like me you were part of the birth generation of Web analytics for marketing and eCommcerce purposes in the 2000s then what you know about ClickTale is probably based on the startup years of the company.  Yet since those pioneer years when ClickTale first brought cloud based customer experience analytics to the market the company and its solution have come a long way. 

Today, ClickTale serves a very demanding enterprise customer base including  Wal-Mart Stores, Home Depot, Vodafone, Metlife, Adobe, and many more like them.

A lot goes into that.

When software companies cater to the needs of users such as these their solutions necessarily evolve to keep up with their enterprise-caliber requirements.  Customers demand it and exposure to their users both informs and pushes product, support, and consulting teams to scale to their needs.

The result is a level of solution maturity that wouldn’t be easy to create in a vacuum.

In my mind this explains why ClickTale’s solution is an order of magnitude further ahead today than in the past.

So, if your knowledge of ClickTale is a few years old, it’s time to get an update on how ClickTale works today.

How ClickTale works today

Here are many typical examples of enterprise level requirements.

Having joined ClickTale only earlier this summer I cannot take credit for any of these innovations.  But with my 15 years in the space I know to appreciate the work that has gone into these.

“We need to see what our customers are seeing including their full and actual marketing experience on our site. “

Yep,  that requires capturing and replaying not just HTML that the website’s own servers are sending to the Web browser but also third party marketing/eCommerce solutions that are used on the site, e.g. for product recommendations, testing, and targeting. After all, the whole point of those latter solutions is to influence the behavior of visitors. So, server-side data and technology that are blind to those details wouldn’t cut it today. ClickTale solves this by visualizing the full client-side experience.

“Our most important Web pages are secure (https) and have user specific HTML”

It’s a standard need today so ClickTale captures that content through its client-side data collection approach without need for ClickTale to go against the server for that content. As a result, no reauthentication to the server is needed. No need for any funny business with cookies for this to work either.

“We want to be 100% privacy compliant and we definitely don’t want to record sensitive details such as customers’ payment info etc.”

But of course!  By default no PII whatsoever is recorded. Such details are simply excluded and they don’t ever leave the visitor’s browser in the direction of ClickTale. That additionally eliminates any risk or questions.

“Even our anonymous data needs to be safe and secure in ClickTale’s cloud solution.”

Absolutely. Clicktale doesn’t just rely on certified data centers but Clicktale’s app itself is ISO27001 certified. Without the latter, any security that the data center provides would not be enough. Anyone who knows their salt on security will tell you that. ClİckTale is invested in a team of security professionals on staff to actively manage security. Few tech giants can match the everyday focus on securing customers’ data that ClickTale is focused on here.

“Our website HTML incorporates a lot of dynamic interactions and messages that visitors see driven by JavaScript, Ajax. etc. We need to make sure that both replays and heatmaps reflect these experiences.”

Very true for virtually all websites today. So ClickTale today has specialized technology under the hood to record customers’ interactions and exposure to all that dynamic content. It doesn’t stop at recording.  There is even more special functionality built into ClickTale’s heatmaps to make sense of today’s dynamic websites.

“We are already swimming in data. What we need is answers. “

Agreed. Many of the largest enterprises online are partnering with ClickTale for site optimization. It’s not just that seeing the actual customer experiences in ClickTale helps them turn web analytics,  VoC, and A/B testing data into intelligence by answering the why behind the what.  But ClickTale’s experienced CX consultants also work hand in glove with their customers to augment their staff with additional capacity for analyzing the customer experience.

“Sampling is not enough,  we want to capture 100% of the sessions that matter for analysis. “

Of course you do!  So ClickTale provides 100% recording for all sessions that are important to capture for analysis.

“We want to use ClickTale and our other digital intelligence solutions as one integrated platform.”

Almost all enterprises use ClickTale integrated with their Web analytics,  A/B testing,  and VoC solutions. No wonder. The synergy is huge.

• Analyze & optimize your segments that you have defined in your Web analytics solution by adding ClickTale’s visual layer of insights that show the actual customer behavior behind the numbers.
• Understand what to test and why certain experiences win vs fail.
• Understand what happened on the site leading up to the feedback that customers submit.

While you hear software vendors talk about 1+1=3 value propositions all the time, I have rarely seen it to be as obviously true and clear as with the integration between ClickTale and the above type of solutions.

…

The sum of these and many other innovations are what make ClickTale an enterprise-class solution. 

And I know the best is yet to come.

As the web (especially mobile!) evolve further every day, there is so much more that the ClickTale team is working towards for our customers.