Fullstory Resource Center

2027 Digital Experience Playbook

Fullstory — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:00:00 GMT

Each year we look at the behavioral data we capture to find the trends that matter most across every industry we serve. Here's what this year's data reveals about digital experience as a whole, and what it means for how you plan for 2027.

The breakage-frustration split: industries diverging on how errors translate to user frustration
Engagement: more time spent doesn't always mean deeper engagement
The device gap: mobile experiences improving unevenly across industries
A new kind of noise: AI agents are showing up in the data across every industry

This is just a glimpse of what the full data reveals.

Experience the complete Digital Benchmark Report 2026 and compare your own data.

Use Claude, Cursor, or another LLM? Access a ready-to-use prompt that lets you compare your own analytics data against the benchmark, no Fullstory required. If you do use Fullstory, the MCP connection makes the comparison even easier.

2027 Digital Experience Playbook for Gaming

Fullstory — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:00:00 GMT

In high-stakes digital experiences, friction isn't just frustrating, it can interrupt the action. Here's what this year's data reveals about player experience, and what it means for how you plan for 2027.

The pile-up: rage, dead, and error clicks moving together
Engagement: more time in play, not more engagement
The device gap: mobile errors and dead clicks diverging
A new kind of noise: detection's blind spot

This is just a glimpse of what the full data reveals.

Experience the complete Digital Benchmark Report 2026 and compare your own data.

2027 Digital Experience Playbook for Food & Beverage

Fullstory — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:00:00 GMT

Hungry customers don't have much patience for digital friction. Here's what this year's data reveals about ordering and guest experience, and what it means for how you plan for 2027.

The decoupling: breakage and frustration both easing
Engagement: shorter sessions, same depth
The device gap: mobile stable, ordering isn't
A new kind of noise: reading unusual signals correctly

This is just a glimpse of what the full data reveals.

Experience the complete Digital Benchmark Report 2026 and compare your own data.

2027 Digital Experience Playbook for Travel & Hospitality

Fullstory — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:00:00 GMT

Travelers expect digital experiences to keep pace with their plans. Here's what this year's data reveals about the booking experience, and what it means for how you plan for 2027.

The decoupling: breakage down, frustration flat
Engagement: longer journeys, same progress
The device gap: mobile friction easing
A new kind of noise: booking agents vs. bot traffic

This is just a glimpse of what the full data reveals.

Experience the complete Digital Benchmark Report 2026 and compare your own data.

2027 Digital Experience Playbook for Software

Fullstory — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:00:00 GMT

The role software plays is changing, along with how people use it. Here's what this year's data reveals about product experience, and what it means for how you plan for 2027.

The pile-up: breakage, frustration, and the one signal that improved
Engagement: shorter sessions, shallower use
The device gap: mobile friction eased on both fronts
A new kind of noise: agents becoming users

This is just a glimpse of what the full data reveals.

Experience the complete Digital Benchmark Report 2026 and compare your own data.

2027 Digital Experience Playbook for Financial Services

Fullstory — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:00:00 GMT

Digital financial experiences are getting harder to read from traditional signals alone. Here's what this year's data reveals about the customer experience, and what it means for how you plan for 2027.

The inversion: breakage up, frustration down
Engagement: more time without more trust
The device gap: stability vs. expectations
A new kind of noise: telling bots from legitimate agents

This is just a glimpse of what the full data reveals.

Experience the complete Digital Benchmark Report 2026 and compare your own data.

Fullstory for Customer Agents

Fullstory — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:00:00 GMT

Session summaries and behavioral context, delivered into your support platform, so agents stop guessing.

Workforce: Boost productivity with optimized tools and workflows

Fullstory — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Fullstory Workforce reveals workflow issues & unused tools to cut costs and boost employee productivity.

What great analytics looks like when AI meets real behavior

Fullstory — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 06:00:00 GMT

This session was recorded live during Virtual Innovation Day.

Fullstory’s Claire Fang, Chief Product & Technology Officer, and Angela Sze, Director of Product, share how StoryAI transforms behavioral data into trusted answers that drive action. You’ll see a real demo and hear how Caesars Sportsbook & Casino is already using Ask StoryAI to unlock insights and move faster. StoryAI is built on Fullcapture and understands your business context, delivering clear, proactive recommendations that help every team get work done.

See what StoryAI can do.

Fullstory overview video

Fullstory — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 19:00:00 GMT

Leading product teams use Fullstory, the intelligent digital experience platform that tells you everything you need to know about how people interact with your digital experience.

Fullstory automatically uncovers issues, reveals top opportunities to improve conversions, shows you the real customer experience behind every data point, and makes it easy for your whole team to debug together.

Level up your digital experience with Fullstory: Get a demo today.

Guides and Surveys: Where insight and action unite

Fullstory — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:00:00 GMT

See how Fullstory’s Guides and Surveys turns behavioral insights into real-time, contextual engagement.

StoryAI: Your always-on team of agent analysts

Fullstory — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 05:00:00 GMT

StoryAI is Fullstory’s intelligence layer that turns behavioral data into clear, actionable insights.

Advanced plan: Elevate your analytics

Fullstory — Wed, 15 May 2024 05:00:00 GMT

For brands looking to boost growth and enhance market responsiveness with data-driven decision-making.

Business plan: Understand user behavior

Fullstory — Wed, 15 May 2024 05:00:00 GMT

For teams that need total cross-functional clarity into their digital portfolio.

Anywhere: Activation: Turning moments into momentum

Fullstory — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Anywhere: Activation turns live behavioral signals into real-time change for personalized experiences.

Anywhere: Warehouse: Clean, ready-to-use behavioral data

Fullstory — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Anywhere: Warehouse provides clean, structured behavioral data into your warehouse for faster insights.

The complete guide to fixing customer frustration online

Fullstory — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 06:00:00 GMT

Understanding customer sentiment is fundamental to crafting exceptional user experiences. Sentiment analysis, an essential piece of behavioral analytics, provides invaluable insights into how users feel about your website or mobile application, enabling enterprises to tailor their offerings for maximum engagement and satisfaction. When looking at the full spectrum of sentiment, from delight to rage, frustration is a critical indicator of potential issues within the digital journey.

Fullstory's Digital Benchmark Report reveals an industry-wide average of 308 error clicks per 1,000 sessions, signaling significant user frustration. These frustration signals are crucial for pinpointing improvement areas, as high frustration levels can lead to site abandonment, reduced loyalty, and negative perceptions of the brand. Addressing these signals is important for preserving a positive user experience.

In the section below, we delve deep into frustration—exploring its causes and, most importantly, how Fullstory's behavioral data platform offers a sophisticated approach to identifying and mitigating frustrating experiences.

Why frustrating digital experiences matter (and how Fullstory's behavioral data platform can help)

Almost two-thirds (64%) of global consumers say they’re likely to leave a site or app without completing a transaction if they encounter a problem or frustration, according to a Fullstory survey.

Making this even more alarming, less than one in five (19%) digital professionals say they understand where and why customers become frustrated on their site or app.

This means that enterprises around the world are leaving money on the table when it comes to frustration-driven site abandonment.

While these stats speak for themselves, you're probably asking questions like:

What are the main drivers of frustration online?
What are the identifiable signs of struggle?
What's the future of frustration detection online?
How do you use Fullstory's frustration signals to search for broken experiences on your website or app?

All of these questions (and more!) are answered in our guide to finding and fixing customer frustration online.

1. The state of customer frustration online

Why do you get frustrated online?

According to Fullstory’s 2023 consumer survey, 77% of global consumers say that their top priority when shopping online is “to quickly accomplish what I came to do.”

People come to your site or app to accomplish a task—whether to learn something, make a purchase, get work done, or do any of a million other things. Frustration arises when they encounter an obstacle that inhibits the completion of that task—like the site being too slow, confusing navigation, a broken element, etc.

It doesn't take much struggle during these critical moments for your users to disappear. Remember, almost two-thirds (64%) of global consumers say they’re likely to leave a site or app without completing a transaction if they encounter a digital problem or frustration.

Plus, your competition is just a click, tap, or search away. That's why understanding, identifying, and eliminating the causes of user frustration is critical for success online.

The 7 biggest causes of online user frustration

Now that we've identified the root of user frustration online, let’s look at some examples of the most common culprits of poor digital experiences.

1. Clunky, dysfunctional, dated, or just bad site or app elements and design

Every element showcased on your website or app has the potential to delight, help, confuse, or frustrate customers. The possibilities for what you can feature on your platform are virtually endless.

Listed below are just a few ways to frustrate customers with the design, UI/UX, or “stuff” you put on your site or app:

Eye-catching, look-at-me elements. These can create unnecessary distractions.
Auto-play videos or music. No one likes a panicked search for the mute or pause button.
Hiding or omitting functional navigation elements. E.g. "Where is [Search | Login | Support | Contact | some other basic thing]?"
Too-clever navigation. I.e., using unconventional words for common navigation elements.
Text/images/elements that are too big or small.
Confusing icons. I.e. icons that don't convey what they represent.
Graphics for text.
Absent calls to action. What is the "Okay, now what ..." for your users?

2. Performance

According to our consumer survey, 72% of global shoppers cite slow page load times as the most frustrating digital issue to encounter—more frustrating than dead links, broken forms, or page glitches.

Highlighting the importance of page load times even further, 47% of consumers expect a website to load in two seconds or less. Additionally, 40% will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.

The takeaway from this data is clear: If your site doesn’t load in a timely manner, nothing else really matters—because shoppers will leave before they see it.

3. Aggressive tactics

There are some things that websites and applications still do that are likely to trigger frustration. While some tactics only become "aggressive" in a specific context, most should almost always be avoided. Here are a few of the most common aggressive tactics that are likely to make users angry:

Pop-ups, pop-unders, lightbox overlays, etc. How fast can you find and click the “X?” Perhaps the most egregious offender that still gets a lot of playtime is the CTA to "sign-up for our newsletter" lightbox overlay—triggered on the first visit to a site after a handful of seconds.
Ads! In particular, the ones that take over the entire screen with auto-play sound and no option to exit. While advertisements may be a required revenue stream (and in-your-face ads are more likely to be seen, clicked, and valued), there's a tenuous balance. The rise in ad-blocking software is a solid indicator that many advertisers and publishers are taking ads too far. Additionally, advertisements with clickbait thumbnails or titles can create cognitive load for your users, who must tease out if the "article" is real or an ad. Associating your brand with clickbait is likely something you want to avoid.
Opt-in boxes, automatically checked. Automatically being opted-in to marketing materials may increase sign-ups, but it can also infuriate your users. Tread lightly.
Which one/where's the download button? While this should go without saying, attempting to trick users into clicking the wrong button sows distrust, at best. If ad placements on your site sit near critical buttons, consider how those advertisements may be used against your users.

There are other questionable tactics that can drive users up the wall. For a comprehensive overview of practices to avoid, refer to this list of "dark patterns."

4. It's broken

If your website or application isn't working, it's highly likely your users are going to notice. Granted, the site or application may not be working for lots of reasons. Here are just a couple:

User error. Sometimes customers can’t seem to figure out how to use your site or app. And that’s your fault, like it or not.
Bugs. Some part of the site is broken. Perhaps it’s a bug. Perhaps something else.
Dead links. No one likes a button that leads nowhere.

5. It's taking too long to do [x]

If users feel like the process to reach a certain page on your site (or point of conversion) takes too long or requires too many steps, they will quickly become frustrated.

Filling out forms or navigating the checkout process are two trouble areas that can rapidly turn into a bad user experience. Consider that 70% of consumers will abandon their shopping cart, 18% of those users citing the checkout process as being "too long/complicated.”

6. I’m confused and/or I have no idea what I’m doing

Have you ever interacted with a site or app and felt you should be able to do something obvious but can't figure out how? Circular and unintuitive navigation can cause significant frustration for online shoppers.

Most users will just leave, with only a select few making it over to help documentation, and only 43% will leave feedback if they encounter an issue.

7. My device is broken and/or my internet connection stinks, etc.

We've all been there—a slow (or missing) internet connection, a lagging, uncooperative device.

The kicker about this one is that it doesn't even have to be your site or app's fault for you to take the blame. What can you even do about this one?

One solution, though not an easy one, is to prepare the responsive design of your site for users who might have poor internet connections. Google, for example, encourages employees to test out their products over slower internet speeds by mimicking 3G (and other) connection speeds as options across the Google corporate Wi-Fi.

There are only imperfect solutions, if any, for this one. You may need to get creative.

Frustration detection—indirect vs. direct

Today, online businesses rely on two broad means of gauging customer sentiment, whether positive or negative (frustration or engagement). These two methods can be categorized as direct or indirect.

Direct methods to measure user frustration on the web

Direct methods of gauging frustration require user participation. “Tell us your dissatisfaction.” Tools like surveys, support tickets, contact forms, social media monitoring, etc. all function as a “direct” read on the customer experience.

There are three major problems with direct methods of frustration measurement:

1. They require the customer to do the hard work

That “work” is jumping through hoops—e.g. filling out contact forms, using chat support, placing phone calls, going on social media rants, whatever, to express frustration. This process only works for customers who are willing to go through the hassle, which is likely a lower percentage of your overall frustrated customers. The result is data that is going to be slanted to a certain level of frustration. It very likely will miss low-level frustrations—the kind of things that customers will grumble through and not report.

2. They assume a customer can articulate their frustration

Have you ever been in a bad mood but you weren’t exactly sure why? Online experiences don't have to be in-your-face frustrating to be dissatisfying.

Many times it takes a number of events to create a frustrating experience—the kind of bad experience that drives a customer to respond to a survey and provide critical feedback. The problem here is that the content of the feedback may not articulate what exactly went wrong. The customer may only report the last straw, the first, or maybe some part in the middle.

3. They can bias results

The Hawthorne Effect is a real problem when it comes to polling users on their experience. If you’re not familiar, the Hawthorne Effect is “a type of reactivity in which individuals modify an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed.”

Directly asking customers about their experience can be fruitful; however, it’s important to recognize its limitations. And the greatest limitation of directly asking customers about their experience is that the respondents will always be a limited set of users, often leading to selection bias. This means the feedback collected may not accurately represent the views of all users, as it primarily reflects the opinions of those who chose to respond.

Indirect methods to measure user frustration on the web

Indirect methods for measuring online experiences show a great deal of promise when it comes to understanding customer frustration. However, the metrics most often used to track frustration—metrics such as elevated bounce rates off a given page, average time on page, changes in conversion rates, etc.—have been blunt instruments and limited in their usefulness. Consider bounce rate. Assuming the web page or app being measured isn’t a single-page app, bounce rate can only tell you if a customer hit a page and then left your site. Whether a given bounce is a sign of frustration is difficult to know with any certainty. Similar problems exist with metrics like average time on page, conversion rate changes, etc.

Giving a voice to unspoken frustration

At Fullstory, we assume the customer’s default reaction to having a bad experience online is—at best—to say nothing. At worst, they report their bad experience, but not to you—to others.

For most, bad experiences are never shared anywhere, and the result is a gap between the real and the reported online experience.

Fullstory is helping teams bridge that gap through session replay and search technology. The Frustration Guide serves to help you understand these tools so that you can reduce user struggle online.

The future of frustration detection is indirect

While indirect methods for measuring customer frustration online have been historically limited, advances in technology have created new ways to measure and understand the online customer experience.

That's where session replay comes in.

Replay is expanding what’s possible when it comes to understanding the customer experience online. How? Fullstory uses autocapture to log all user interaction data on a website or app in a privacy-first way. Then, Fullstory uses that data to create exact, context-rich recreations of a user’s session.

Session replay is useful for providing context for user frustration received directly through feedback. For example, you can connect a given user’s feedback to their specific session, so if a customer has a problem, you can watch their session and see just what was going wrong. Unfortunately, only a subset of users will provide direct feedback about frustrating experiences and many frustrating experiences will go undetected.

Session replay is extremely helpful when, say, a user calls the support center with a question or problem, and the agent can quickly call up their session to see what went wrong. However, it’s even more useful for understanding issues that are never reported at all.

Fullstory automatically captures and indexes every interaction—including user behaviors that correlate to negative, frustrating online experiences. These events are easily searchable to developers, designers, customer support, and other teams. Once frustrated sessions and pages are identified, they can be researched and remedied with Fullstory insights.

2. Frustration signals captured in session replay

What online behaviors signal user frustration? While yelling, keyboard pounding, mouse slamming, exasperated muttering, and making obscene gestures at the computer screen (or mobile device) are all clear signs of frustration, they're not able to be captured in session replay. However, frustration can be signaled to Fullstory through on-screen behaviors—things like excessive clicking on specific elements or mouse thrashing, and many more.

Fullstory indexes five primary customer frustration signals: rage clicks, dead clicks, error clicks, form abandonment, and thrashed cursor.

What are rage clicks?

Rage clicks occur when users rapidly click (or tap) on your site or app. Rage clicking is the digital equivalent of cursing to release frustration.

As a frustration event, rage clicks were first introduced by Fullstory in 2015 and have become an important way to identify frustrating sessions on websites and apps.

There are all kinds of web elements that can induce rage clicks, from graphics to text. Rage clicks are often the result of a mismatch between user expectations and reality—perhaps users believe clicking should trigger something specific to happen but nothing does, so they click some more.

For example, you can induce rage clicks by putting a screenshot of a Youtube video, complete with the triangle play button. Users will begin clicking away on “Play” but when nothing happens (it's just a screenshot!), frustration will result. Video can also induce rage clicking when it just doesn't load fast enough.

Critically, it's not easy to predict what might cause a rage click, which is why searching your user sessions in Fullstory for rage click events is so useful—you'll make unexpected discoveries.

Rage clicks captured in session replay

Below is a session recreation from our demo site "Fruitshoppe." In it, you can see how Rage Clicks are captured in Fullstory. Look for the click click clicking that occurs around 0:48 as the user rage clicks on the Purchase button (Notice also the rage clicks get the double whammy of creating a JavaScript Error in the console):

How Fullstory users put rage clicks to work

How are Fullstory users making use of rage clicks?

SpanishDict found users rage clicking on verb conjugations. Having made the discovery, they investigated further and began allowing clicks to create pronunciations and specific meanings. (Read more).
TravelPerk searches sessions for rage clicks, observes what part of their app is creating frustration, and then runs a broader search in Fullstory to research sessions that include interaction with the offending element. (Read more).
Appcues saw new users rage click simply because of a server-side delay that, when paired with confusing copy, resulted in users rapidly re-clicking a submit button:

From time to time, rage clicks search results in Fullstory may surface false positives (e.g. the most common false positive is when users are paging through a multi-page app, which can result in lots of clicks on the same element). You can either research these moments to determine if they are opportunities to improve your product (See From rage clicks to product improvements: how rage clicks reveal user desires for unsatisfied "Jobs-to-Be Done") or refine your rage click results using Fullstory's "ignore" capabilities.

More rage click resources

We've written extensively about rage clicks and if rapid-fire clicks are a focus for your research, you should take a read through these additional resources:

Rage Click Examples and Actions Examples of what can drive Rage Clicks as well as a case study from a Fullstory customer.
From Rage Clicks to Product Improvements. How to use Rage Clicks and the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework to reveal potential desire paths in your product.
Rage Clicks, the Basics. Our knowledge base article on Rage, Error, and Dead Clicks.
List Your Top Rage Clicks.

What are dead clicks?

Dead clicks are captured by Fullstory when users click an element on your web site or app but the click has no effect on the page. While dead clicks share some similarities to rage clicks, they do not require rapid-fire, back-to-back clicks to trigger Fullstory’s frustration detection.

Unlike rage clicks, the behavioral signal associated with dead clicks can be nuanced and subtle, which is why watching sessions that contain dead clicks is required to tease out theories as to what might be driving the behavior. Similar to rage clicks but to a greater degree, there is a chance that a dead click is not out of frustration—a false positive.

For example, users may be clicking the “background” of a web page in order to escape an overlay or assure focus is on the page. In other cases we see instances when dead clicks happen on paragraphs of text, which may signal focused attention by the user as they struggle to internalize a challenging concept.

Dead clicks are useful for teasing out these nuanced behaviors. Investigating them in Fullstory can result in discovering opportunities to help users.

More examples of what dead clicks can reveal

If you have Fullstory’s Page Insights pack, you have an additional way to surface dead clicks through click maps. This visual can be particularly useful for understanding where aggregated users are “dead clicking” on a given page on your site.

Using Page Insights with click maps to look at dead clicks is helpful by providing a visual of where users click most—with no effect on the page. Dead clicks are fascinating as they can hint at mismatches in expectations, confusion or enhanced focus, and many other reasons that can only be understood through replaying sessions.

What are error clicks?

When a user click triggers a client-side JavaScript error, Fullstory takes note, indexing these events as “error clicks.” Error clicks may or may not result in a user noticing something is breaking with the web site or app. Watching sessions that contain error clicks enables developers to understand the conditions that produced the JavaScript errors in order to diagnose and solve bugs.

Your users have capacity to put your app or site through the ringer, creating problems you never could have anticipated. By searching sessions for error clicks, you can make sure that all that “work” isn’t wasted, using session replay to reproduce bugs on-the-fly. Beyond bug reproduction, it goes without saying that error clicks are likely to be noticed by users, creating frustrating online experiences. Researching error click sessions should be a top priority for improving the online experience on your site or app.

What is thrashed cursor?

Thrashed cursor—or thrashing cursor or mouse—isn’t some pun for a user so frustrated that they’re losing control of their arms while shouting expletives. Rather, thrashed cursor is when users erratically move their cursor back and forth.

Rapidly moving the cursor over a page can indicate the user is getting exasperated with some aspect of their experience. Perhaps the site performance is slow or they are struggling to figure something out. Thrashed cursor is like a physical outpouring of some mental state in the user—and that state very likely could be frustration.

Like all frustration signals, there is a chance of a false positive with thrashed cursor. E.g. perhaps the user has a broken mouse or their computer is so slow that they’re thrashing their mouse in protest. The only way to deduce if thrashed cursor is signaling frustration is to watch a session and make some observations.

More examples of what thrashed cursors can reveal

Applying the “thrashed cursor” filter to a segment of sessions—e.g. to sessions that include a visit to a specific page on your site or app—can focus research to uncovering specific problems. Alternatively, combining “thrashed cursor” events with other frustration signals such as rage clicks, dead clicks, or error clicks could reveal particularly frustrating experiences—the kind that might lead you to reach out proactively to customers or identify the most odiously frustrating sessions.

What is form abandonment?

Filling out forms on any website or app can be time-consuming, friction-filled, and often downright frustrating. But it doesn’t have to be.

It’s not surprising that many users never make it through a given form on your web site or app. For those situations, Fullstory allows you to search for sessions that contain form abandonment. Watching sessions in which users bail on your forms can be illuminating as there may be specific fields that are tripping them up—perhaps they begin to fill out the form, get hung up on some part of it, and then jump ship.

Mining your sessions for form abandonment has a high probability of surfacing frustration. While those experiences may never be completely eliminated, researching them through session replay is a step toward reducing friction, and that can mean more users completing your forms.

3. Most frustrated sessions

While each frustration signal in Fullstory can be used to research your customer's online experience on your website or app, you might find you'd like to look at the set of worst session replays among the thousands of sessions captured.

For that, you can use Fullstory's frustrated sessions card. This list of user sessions displays for any search or segment you create in Fullstory. Simply open Fullstory and look underneath the most recent session recreations for the cards. Look for the "frustrated sessions" card.

What is a frustrated session?

Frustrated sessions are identified by deploying machine intelligence against every matching session in your segment. Our proprietary algorithm looks for combinations of frustration signals—i.e. rage clicks, error clicks, thrashed cursor, etc.—contained within those sessions in order to determine which sessions contain the most customer frustration.

Let's say a user gets stuck clicking a checkout button. They click "checkout" but nothing happens. After a moment of patience, the customer proceeds to dead click around the page, clicks the button many more times, and for good measure, does some thrashing of their cursor. Fullstory looks at all these behaviors together, identifying the session as containing user frustration.

Replay any session replays from the Most Frustrated Sessions list and you'll jump right to the moments identified as frustrating.

4. Turning frustration into better products

If you reduce user frustration in the online experience, you can increase conversion rates, improve customer retention and reduce churn—all of which contribute to business or organizational success.

Reducing frustrating experiences online starts with awareness and ends with deploying the tools necessary to find, understand, and resolve frustration through product improvements.

To that end, product developers, engineers, marketers, designers, and more are using Fullstory's frustration signals to search tens of thousands of user session recreations. Through replaying these sessions, teams research user intent to see where expectations weren't met. From there, A/B tests and experiments can be used to drive website and app improvements.

Success during a time of ratcheting consumer expectations—competitors a quick click, search, or tap away—demands the use of new technology that can deliver the nuance necessary to understand and improve customer experience online.

Let's reduce user struggle—and grow your revenue—together.

Start solving frustration on the web. Get a demo and see Fullstory in action.

How to choose the right digital experience platform for your business

Fullstory — Fri, 01 May 2020 04:00:00 GMT

11 questions you should ask when evaluating a digital experience platform

Building a digital experience (DX) that customers love is no easy task—the right platform can help.

Our lives are increasingly intertwined with digital. From how we shop to how we date, how we bank to how we access healthcare, how we consume media to how we learn new skills. Yet most organizations fail to deliver a consistently beneficial digital experience. An experience that provides people with exactly what they need, at exactly the right time, with zero friction or frustration.

Imperfect digital experiences abound. Of course, most product leaders know that this is not for lack of awareness or even for lack of effort—but because delivering a seamless digital experience is really really hard.

It’s hard because “digital experience” is massive and multifaceted. It encompasses every digital interaction a person has with a brand, from website to app, digital ads to digital in-store experiences, email communications to push notifications, and so much more.

Within an organization, individuals across functions and teams across departments own different parts of the digital experience, but rarely are these teams operating in sync. They are often siloed, disparate, pulling in multiple directions with misaligned objectives, using different tactics and strategies. The result is a disjointed, imperfect experience for the customer—and each imperfect experience is costly.

According to PWC, one in three people walk away from a business they love after just one bad experience.

Each time your end-user is frustrated, confused, or inhibited when interacting with your brand, they lose patience. Whatever loyalty they had evaporates. This translates to long-term impact on your bottom-line. According to PWC, one in three people walk away from a business they love after just one bad experience.

On the bright side, it works in reverse, too. A great experience served at the right time can strengthen your connection to your customers in a big way and help you differentiate from your competitors—who are only a click away.

That’s where a digital experience analytics platform comes into play. The right platform combined with the right strategy will allow you to confidently manage and improve your digital experience. It should help you reduce operating costs, optimize experiences and boost conversions, and ultimately increase customer happiness and loyalty.

But how do you select the right platform for your business? You start by defining your biggest digital experience challenges.

According to Gartner, by 2024, 80% of IT organizations will undergo radical restructuring and changes to their missions as they embrace product-centric operating models. How can you stay ahead?

What problems are you trying to solve with a digital experience platform?

First things first. When evaluating a digital experience platform, you should focus on the organizational challenge(s) you are trying to solve. Clear problem definition will allow you to zoom in on the capabilities and features that are most important to achieving success with a behavioral data platform.

The most common challenges we hear from customers and prospects can be traced back to two primary causes:

A lack of visibility into the customer’s digital experience (aka The Problem of the Unknown), and
An inability to move quickly due to internal barriers (aka The Problem of Time-to-Value)

The problem of the unknown might sound like...

“We don’t have enough visibility into where and why our users are experiencing friction and getting frustrated.”
“We don’t know how user frustration is impacting conversions and overall customer happiness.”
“We are receiving complaints about poor experience from customers via support or social media, but struggle to replicate the issues.”
“We aren’t sure how changes to our website or app are impacting key funnel metrics.”
“We feel like we’re missing opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell, but we aren’t sure where they are.”
“We hear that our site or app is difficult to use, but struggle to prioritize the most impactful UX adjustments.”

The Problem of Time-to-Value might sound like...

“Our organization is siloed and we struggle to communicate and make improvements quickly.”
“Different teams look at different sources of data, which makes it difficult to all get on the same page.”
“We struggle to create consensus across leadership around where to invest resources to improve the digital experience.”
“It’s difficult for our engineers to prioritize between fixing bugs and developing new feature functionality.”
“Once we ship an experience, we move on. We don’t have a way to quickly iterate and improve.”
“Our competitors are setting the standard for digital experience and we are worried we aren’t keeping up.”

While no digital experience platform is a silver bullet on its own, the right platform wielded in a strategic way should help you resolve your most pressing challenges—including the challenges listed above.

In the next section, we outline 11 factors to consider when you are evaluating a digital experience platform. Depending on your organization’s most pressing issues and objectives, you will want to prioritize certain capabilities over others.

If at any point while reading this guide you have questions, don't hesitate to reach out to our team.

Solving the problem of the unknown

If your most pressing problems revolve around what you don’t know about your digital experience, you’ll want to select a digital experience platform that can help you eliminate blind spots.

You should select a platform that can collect every digital interaction and provide you with trustworthy, complete data so that you can answer any question you might have. Your platform should also surface actionable insights based on this data—to point you to questions you didn’t even know to ask.

Does this platform provide a complete record of digital experience data?

If getting a complete view of how users interact with your site or app is a top priority, you should look for a digital experience platform that offers comprehensive, unsampled data ingestion. This comes down to how the platform is instrumented and its data retention capabilities.

Traditional web analytics often require that you manually tag every element that you want to track on a page so you can report on it later. If you predict users will behave one way and tag accordingly, only to discover users behave in a totally different way, you then miss out on that data. You have to stop, tag the new set of activities, and wait in order to report on what users are actually doing.

In contrast, there is a new kind of digital experience platform that leverages instrumentation-free analytics. Some of these platforms utilize one simple JavaScript snippet to index every user interaction on your site or app from day one; this ensures you don’t miss a single datapoint. With this kind of platform, any additional instrumentation you do only enhances your reporting—it isn't a requirement.

Some of these platforms utilize one simple JavaScript snippet to index every user interaction on your site or app from day one—ensuring you don’t miss a single datapoint.

Note: When evaluating a platform that claims to be "instrumentation-free," make sure to do your homework. In order to truly benefit from this feature, you'll want to ensure all interactions are automatically captured, indexed, and made searchable without the need to continuously adjust and add to the code snippet that sits on the page. You should also understand how the platform secures its data before adding any additional code to your site or app.

Does this platform provide quantitative data (what is happening) and qualitative data (why is it happening)?

To drive significant improvement, teams that own the digital experience need to understand both what is happening and why it is happening when it comes to user interaction with their site or app. You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken and you certainly can’t fix something if you don’t understand why it’s broken.

Web and product analytics provide visibility into engagement, adoption, and high-level trends but rarely illuminate why something happened. Your digital experience platform should help you deeply understand your user’s digital experience, including the root causes of any issues.

It should simultaneously highlight where those issues happen along the customer’s journey and the impact of these issues on your conversion rates. Every insight or hypothesis should be easily tied back to an actual human interaction that can validate and support your next steps.

Your platform should provide both quantitative data and qualitative data so that you can quickly understand and prioritize improvements.

Does this platform proactively find and surface user frustration insights?

A complete record of user interaction data is essential to make well-informed decisions. However, a data lake of that magnitude can be overwhelming if you don’t have a team of analysts extracting and delivering insights. Ideally, your digital experience platform can help you surface actionable insights regardless of organizational resources.

For example, your platform should enable your business intelligence team to extract and analyze all of your digital experience data in a completely customized way. Or, if analyst resources are limited, your platform should be able to automatically surface your most important opportunities for improvement, ranked by potential business impact.

Note: Many digital experience solutions will proactively surface insights, but you’ll want to understand as much as possible about how these recommendations are being made. For example, is there transparency around the formulas used? Can you validate these recommendations with individual user session replays? Proactive insights can be extremely helpful, pointing you to problems you didn’t know existed. But you should have total confidence in the science behind the recommendations.

Does this platform support mobile apps?

If your organization has a mobile app, you will want to select a digital experience platform that can be deployed on mobile apps. Because your user is in a different context when they are using their mobile device, you can’t always apply insights from your website experience to your mobile experience. In fact, the jobs your user is trying to accomplish are often completely different.

With the ever-growing importance of the mobile experience, you’ll want a platform that allows you to collect and analyze data about mobile user interactions specifically—data that is as accurate and high-fidelity as what you’re gathering from your web experience.

Solving the Problem of Time-to-Value

More and more, we’re seeing that digital success is linked to organizational agility. To an organization’s ability to identify and fix bugs and UX issues fast. To its ability to efficiently prioritize, develop, and deploy new products and features that add value to customers’ lives.

These organizations move with agility because they are able to reduce or eliminate the impact of internal silos. The right digital experience platform can be a huge asset here—fostering better cross-team communication and collaboration.

Is this platform easy to implement and maintain?

If speed is an issue, the last thing you’ll want to do is select a digital experience platform that takes weeks, months, or even years to implement. Many platforms on the market require considerable event instrumentation up front as well as continuous maintenance. This can be a time consuming and labor intensive process because you have to manually tag certain elements in the codebase during onboarding and with every deploy.

If your goal is to get up and running quickly and reduce time to actionable insights, you’ll want a platform that takes days (not weeks) to implement and that can automatically collect, organize, and store all of your digital experience data without continuous event instrumentation.

Your organization may already have custom events that you’ve instrumented using a Customer Data Platform, like Segment or Tealium. Because custom events can add additional context to your digital experience data, the DX platform you select should be able to easily ingest these events. Custom event tagging should always be an option—but never a necessity—to gain insight into every customer journey.

Is this platform accessible and usable for both technical and non-technical teams?

In most organizations, multiple teams are responsible for the customer’s digital experience: product, IT, engineering, customer support, UX design, etc. If your organization has a business intelligence team responsible for generating actionable reports and surfacing department-specific insights, you may be less concerned with platform accessibility.

The ability to pivot and act quickly is often a result of individual teams having access to the information they need when they need it.

However, it is becoming clear that the more agile an organization is, the better. According to data from McKinsey, agile companies are far more likely to display high overall organizational health than their slower counterparts. This ability to pivot and act quickly is often a result of individual teams having access to the information they need when they need it. If increased agility is a goal, you should source a DX platform that is easy to use, search, and customize for technical and non-technical teams alike.

Does this platform surface insights that are relevant at every level in the organization?

If your organization is plagued by internal debate when it comes to prioritizing digital experience improvements, you’ll want to source a platform that can translate insights to a variety of audiences.

A product manager may want to understand the factors that most strongly correlate with dropout in a specific funnel. A VP of Ecommerce, on the other hand, is looking for holistic insight into the digital experience so they can strategically understand and improve the experiences that matter the most. One will need a more granular view of user interaction data, the other will need a high-level, aggregate view of the entire digital experience.

Ideally, you can source a digital experience platform that acts as a common source of insights for individuals and teams at every level in the organization, reducing back-and-forth and ensuring your organization can quickly align on its most important opportunities.

How will this platform enrich my existing technology stack?

Extensibility is a critical consideration when you are shopping for a digital experience platform. Your platform should integrate seamlessly with your existing stack and provide data and insights where your teams already spend their time.

You should consider whether the platform you’re evaluating has:

Robust APIs that empower developers to enrich their tech stack with platform data and deepen the insights they receive within the platform itself.
Webhooks to power workflows across the business and allow you to set up automations and take action in real time.
An ecosystem of integrations that allows you to connect your tech stack and create a shared language around digital experience across your business.

To facilitate cross-team alignment and efficient collaboration, you’ll want a behavioral analytics platform that can act as a single source of truth. Any user should be able to find the information they’re looking for within the platform. They should also be able to access digital experience data in the platforms where they already spend their time.

For instance, if your support team spends their time in a support ticketing platform like Zendesk, can they access digital experience data within that system? Can they quickly share that data to your engineering team with all the necessary context?

A well-integrated platform will amplify your entire tech stack with digital experience data, providing a common language for disparate teams.

How will this platform enable efficient iteration and optimization?

Most digital leaders know that there is always more to improve when it comes to digital experience. Customer expectations and needs are constantly changing, which means you should be continuously iterating your digital experience. It isn’t enough to source a DX platform that can help you ship an improvement—because even if you understand the issue, you can’t always be sure that your solution is the right solution.

That’s where experimentation comes in. You need a platform that can quickly point you to the most impactful opportunities for experimentation as well as help you pinpoint why a particular variant performed better than another.

"Building an optimal digital experience isn’t a one-and-done. You have to iterate continuously to meet ever-changing customer needs, which is why experimentation is critical to your business. You no longer have to guess what your customer wants, and your digital experience platform should surface powerful insights into how users interact with your website or app. It should also easily integrate with your experimentation platform to fuel smarter experiments that drive stronger results to delight customers." — Glenn Griffin, VP Global Partnerships and Channels at Optimizely

Two final key considerations: Platform performance and responsibility

Ultimately, you are shopping for a platform because your goal is to optimize your customer’s digital experience. You'll want to ensure that any platform you implement will have minimal negative impact on that experience—both in terms of performance impact and also in the greater context of end-user responsibility.

How will this platform impact the perceived performance of my site or app?

Performance should always be a part of the conversation when you are evaluating a new software—particularly page load time. It’s a known fact that slow site load time correlates with user abandonment. You don’t want to bring on a platform to help you improve the digital experience only to find it slows down your digital experience.

Ask your vendors to walk you through how their platform is instrumented and how that instrumentation impacts the perceived performance of your site or app for end-users.

This consideration is particularly important when you are evaluating platforms for your mobile app. Legacy practices for gathering digital experience data on mobile involve literally hijacking a user’s device to take a screenshot of the application every few frames. This is extremely resource intensive. Not only does it place the burden of gathering performance data on the customer's device (using their battery, data, and bandwidth) but it directly impacts how much energy the device has to run the app, resulting in a frustratingly slow, disjointed user experience.

How does the platform vendor view responsibility—including end-user privacy, data security, and compliance?

Responsibility should be a factor when you are evaluating any kind of data platform: What is the company’s stance on protecting end-user privacy? How do they ensure the data they do collect is secure? How do they adhere to existing legislation? What do they view as their ethical responsibility?

As you evaluate digital experience platforms, look closely at their policies on end-user privacy, security, and compliance with legislation such as CCPA and GDPR.

Choosing the right digital experience analytics platform for your business

Digital channels will continue to become more and more important for most organizations. It is critical that companies prioritize the digital experience—each suboptimal experience is costing your business in lost conversions and eroded customer loyalty. And it’s a missed opportunity to strengthen customer happiness and connection with your brand!

The right digital experience platform will help you streamline your efforts around digital experience management and improvement. Use the factors outlined above to zoom in on the capabilities that are most important to your organization. Once you’ve selected the perfect platform, you can hit the ground running, differentiating yourself from competitors through experience and fueling continuous growth.

About Fullstory

Fullstory provides a new way to understand and improve your digital experience.

Fullstory’s behavioral analytics platform enables businesses to continuously improve their digital customer experience across websites, web apps, and mobile apps. The platform proactively surfaces actionable insights from billions of data points, helping product teams at ecommerce and SaaS companies make digital improvements that reduce costs and reclaim revenue.

Fullstory's industry-leading technology is flexible and easy to use, making it a clear choice for organizations that want to operationalize digital experience management and break down internal information silos, while upholding end-user privacy.

Fullstory was founded in 2014 on the belief that everyone benefits from a more perfect digital experience; today the company has 200+ distributed employees with offices in Atlanta and London. Fullstory is the go-to solution for thousands of product leaders across the world’s most innovative consumer brands and Fortune 100 companies. To learn more about Fullstory, browse our customer stories and reviews on G2.

Workforce: Privacy and security

Fullstory — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Improve workforce productivity while ensuring data privacy and compliance.

Anywhere: Activate behavioral data at scale

Fullstory — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Fullstory Anywhere activates behavioral data across your stack to drive personalization and performance.

Fullstory portfolio: Behavioral data in action

Fullstory — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Unlock first-party behavioral data to improve digital experiences and drive customer loyalty.

Debugging with full context using Sentry + Fullstory

Fullstory — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 05:00:00 GMT

Spend less time debugging and more time coding.

Watch as engineers from Fullstory and Sentry demonstrate, in real time, how to get to the bottom of a customer experience issue quickly and efficiently using the Fullstory & Sentry integration.

What's Covered

Topics discussed in this webinar include:

A technical overview of how to connect Sentry + Fullstory to ensure every error is paired with a Fullstory session link and Sentry errors are searchable in Fullstory.
An over-the-shoulder look as Steve and Patrick debug two real life errors using Fullstory + Sentry together.
How Sentry + Fullstory make it easy to understand what led a user to a specific error state, whether the error impacted the user’s experience, how many users are being impacted by the error, and of course, how to fix the error.

Fullstory's Session Replay

Fullstory — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 04:00:00 GMT

One click session summaries take session insights to the next level. Save time with AI generated context surrounding a specific user’s behavior so you can move towards action more efficiently.

Travel and hospitality: Digital experience statistics to know

Fullstory — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 04:00:00 GMT

Globally, 44% of people are cutting back on travel in the face of economic uncertainty. Hotels, airlines, and other travel companies need to woo travelers with a great digital experience if they hope to eventually greet them at the front desk.

Based on data from two consumer surveys, here are the trends travel and hospitality companies need to know to succeed in this new era of travel.

How often travelers book lodging, transportation, and activities before a trip

How people rate their digital experiences with the travel industry

Travel sites need to nail the basics

Many travel companies have room for improvement

Putting a price tag on perfection

Spark 2022: The first DXI conference

Fullstory — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 05:00:00 GMT

A look back at some of the highlights from Spark 2022 in Atlanta.

The good and bad of product friction

Fullstory — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 05:00:00 GMT

I would say that there are absolutely times where friction is a terrible thing and there's no way to spin it in a positive way, but I would say plenty of times friction really helps slow the user down in a way that's really valuable and meaningful to them. —Agata Bugaj, Senior Product Manager at Fullstory

Agata Bugaj, Head of Product Management at Fullstory, joined Melanie Crissey, Product Marketing Manager, for the last LinkedIn Live session in our Product Management series. In this episode, which aired on June 11, 2019, Agata and Melanie discuss the implications of product friction–good and bad.

Agata and Melanie discussed topics including:

How to identify product friction.
How to solve for different types of friction.
When and why friction is not always bad.

You can keep up with our LinkedIn content by following us there or on Twitter.

Watch the Replay

Read the Transcript

Melanie Crissey: Hi, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us for Fullstory Live. I'm your host, Melanie Crissey, and we are recording live from the beautiful Fullstory studio here at HQ4 in sunny, hot Atlanta, Georgia. I am thrilled to be here with Agata Bugaj. Agata is a Head of the Product Management practice here at Fullstory, and just a little bit of light housekeeping to know what you're jumping into day. This is our third and final session in a series on Product Management that we've been doing on LinkedIn live over the last couple of weeks. All of these sessions are recorded, so you can review the old ones on YouTube or on the Fullstory channel, and this one will be recorded and the transcript will be up on the blog after. So if you need to duck out, have lunch, do you your thing, all of this will be available for you later.

Melanie Crissey: We are live, live for real. So this only works if you give us your questions, your suggestions, your ideas, your banter, your reaction emojis, your live Tweet storm. Bring it. I've got a great team from Fullstory here that's going to help me get those questions from LinkedIn to my space phone. So our agenda is we're going to do quick introductions, we're going to talk, just discuss about the topic for the day which is friction, and then we're going to go straight to your questions that you've sent over. So participate and we'd love to hear from you.

Melanie Crissey: So if you're just joining us, again, my name is Melanie Crissey. I am a product marketing manager here at Fullstory. I was a Fullstory customer for several years before joining the company about two and a half years ago. I am just really grateful to be in the room with you, Agata. Agata is a leader here. Agata, introduce yourself, tell everybody a little bit about your experience.

Agata Bugaj: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thanks so much for having me, Melanie. It's super fun to be here. So yes, my name's Agata, I'm on the produce management team here at Fullstory. I've been at Fullstory a little bit less than you. I've been here about seven months. It's crazy how quickly time flies, but it's been-

Melanie Crissey: Only seven months.

Agata Bugaj: I know, it's crazy.

Melanie Crissey: I feel like it's been so long.

Agata Bugaj: I know. I know, but it's been amazing. And actually, my path to Product Management I would say was a very long and windy road, if you will. I actually started my career as a software engineer, and I loved what I was doing, but I often times found myself asking questions like why are we building this? And who is this for? And what are the goals that they're trying to achieve? And what's happening in the market?

Agata Bugaj: So I found myself doing some soul searching and I thought, you know, I really am interested in this thing called Product Management. I didn't know much about it, and so I again, took sort of a long and windy road to get into product. I went to business school, I spent some time doing consulting, and then ultimately made it to product and absolutely love it. Have been here ever since, and I actually spent ... prior to joining Fullstory, spend almost six years at Home Depot working primarily on the site experience and the Product Management team, so super excited to be in product and to talk to you about friction because it's such an important topic. So, yeah.

Melanie Crissey: Yeah. Yeah. Friction is super near and dear to my heart and I'm actually kind of self conscious about it. I was recently accused of delivering a friction-based onboarding, and I'm like processing what that it's not what I meant to do, so I'm processing that. So I'm really, really excited to talk about it today and kind of learn with you. So just to get grounded for anybody who's joining the call who maybe ... what is friction, so can we talk about what do we talk about when we talk about friction? Can you define it at a really high level?

Agata Bugaj: Yeah, absolutely. I love what that was starting there, right? Because you have to define the thing first before you talk about it. So friction is basically any time that your customers are trying to do something, to have a goal in mind, and they're unable to achieve that goal. They're not able to do the thing that they want to do, which often times is actually we want them to do also, right? So as an example, I guess I would say take a step back, two high level buckets of friction. There's the ... we've built something and it's not the experience that enables our customers to complete their goal. So a great example of this would be customers trying to check out and for the life of them, they just can't. They keep getting some error message, and they just cannot move forward. That's friction. That's very ... I like to call it frustration. The experience exists and it's just frustrating, something's not working.

Agata Bugaj: There's another bucket of friction that's really just around opportunity identification. It's a customer is trying to do something and they're using your product in some work flow, and the product just hasn't yet evolved to the point where it can help them. So a great example of this might be let's say you're planning a trip and it's two days before and you take your suitcase out of the closet and you're like, ugh, I forget this thing is broken. The zipper doesn't work for some reason, right? And you're like, gosh, I don't actually have time to go to the store and buy a new suitcase. Gosh, I wish I knew if this favorite retailer, X, Y, Z, was able to deliver me the suitcase of my dreams within ... before I leave for my trip.

Agata Bugaj: And if they have that information on the site, they ... you knew that it was in stock and you knew that you could get it, you maybe knew how much you had to pay to get it before the time that you leave because there's a cost associated with that, or a value rather, if you have that information, you could make a decision. You could reach your goal of making sure you had ... this is a terrible example, but you know, that you have a suitcase that you can take with you, right? So that would be sort of what I would call an opportunity. Not so much frustration, but your product could evolve if you have a site that sells suitcases for instance, your product could evolve to a state where it could meet your needs.

Melanie Crissey: Yeah. No, I love that and I can think of so many real examples, so we're going to be thinking a little bit about e-commerce examples, shopping is a good example, but sometimes it's SaaS products, but in e-comm, I think about the difference between your search takes too many steps for me to get the results that I want, the filtering is too hard, versus your site has no search on it at all. But there's also, and I'm totally biased, my background is in performance so I really care about speed. So there's also this aspect of friction which could be lagginess or slowness, right? Maybe you designed it or the opportunity is met and it's there, but it's just taking too long. So how do we think about solving for those types of friction.

Agata Bugaj: Yeah, absolutely. And that's a great example of that what I would call that frustration type of friction. You built the thing, but it's just not meeting the need because it's taking you too long and the thing is spinning and things like that.

Melanie Crissey: So it falls in the first bucket.

Agata Bugaj: Yeah.

Melanie Crissey: Because it's just not working as designed even though it's there.

Agata Bugaj: Exactly. But you know, it's interested, you mention bucket and then you also mention kind of how do we think about prioritizing friction. Those actually go very hand in hand and what I mean by that is any strong product team is going to have what I call a diverse or balanced backlog of things that they're working on. I think about it in buckets. There's the bucket of work that you do to drive revenue. There's the bucket of work that you do to reduce costs. There's the bucket of work around driving C set up, so customer satisfaction, delight. There's the bucket of work that really gets that technical performance and infrastructure work and making sure that your product is healthy. And you have these different buckets of work and you realize that you need to be doing all those things to have a product that not only maximizes business value, but also customer delight.

Agata Bugaj: And so when you think about gosh, how would I actually prioritize something that maybe is performance related versus hey, this feature that I know is going to drive revenue. In an ideal situation, you actually don't have to trade off between the two. And it's not an exact science. It's not like you can say, hey, 20 percent of my time every single week is going to be here or there, but you kind of have this idea of this is directionally the types of work that we should be doing, and so then when it gets to ... let's say you have a bucket.

Agata Bugaj: How teams define buckets is, you know, there's definitely some ... how do I put this? There's no exact science but the team has to get together and figure out what are the buckets that we're going to sort of slaughter work into. And if you have a bucket that's all around hey, maybe it's performance issues or maybe it's defects or bugs or what not, then you prioritizing against sort of ... you're comparing apples to apples in that case. You're just saying we know we need to spend some percentage of our capacity making the site more performant, right? These are the things that we can do to address that. Which one's going to give us the most value from a business standpoint as well as from a customer standpoint. So that's ideally the trade off that you would actually just need to make.

Melanie Crissey: Yeah. Yeah. I think that trade off in value is I think where I always get so stuck where I'm just like ... so kind of going back, taking a step back, we talked a little bit about prioritizing friction, but even in order to prioritize it, you have to identify that it exists. So what are the tools and processes that you follow to just know that friction's happening in the wild?

Agata Bugaj: That's such a good question. There are multiple ways, and some of it goes back to what type of friction are you actually able to identify. The first thing that I love to do when I get into a new space is it's a good old journey map. As basic as that is, it's the ... what a journey map does is it really enables you to understand your customer and what are the things that they're doing today that either help them or make things harder for them. So at the highest level, you identify areas of opportunity where your product could slot in. So as an example, if I'm ... again, we're going to use the same terrible example but we started there so we're just going to continue.

Melanie Crissey: We're really attached to the suitcase.

Agata Bugaj: Yeah, let's say that I am suitcase.com.

Melanie Crissey: Yes.

Agata Bugaj: Terrible example.

Melanie Crissey: Free startup idea.

Agata Bugaj: Exactly, right? I need to understand when customers come to my site, what are they looking ... what are the goal that they're trying to achieve? So going out and identifying what are my personas, who are my customers, what are their personas, and what are the key areas of the workflow, and where do they expect me to slot in or where do they want me to slot in or where could I slot myself in? It's really, really important. So that's a very good qualitative way of identifying those areas of opportunity, right? When it comes to ... but there are also quantitative ways. So let's assume that I am suitcase.com and I know that ... so I have a lot of analytics and tracking and things like that, and I know that my cart-to-order is a certain percentage. If I have the proper analytics set up and the dashboard and all that stuff, when things dip, when defects get introduced or performance issues arise, if I have the right tracking set up and the right alerting, I can actually be notified or be aware that there's some sort of friction ... the site, the thing that we've built isn't doing what we intended for it to do based on things that we know today. So that's sort of a quantitative way that you can identify friction.

Agata Bugaj: Of course I have to mention that there are tools like Fullstory that actually can play in both buckets, and what I mean by that is we've defined, as you very well know and have used in the past, our frustration heuristics, so we can identify if someone is, for lack of a better word, expressing negative sentiment towards an experience because they're ...

Melanie Crissey: Rage Clicking, yeah.

Agata Bugaj: So we can identify that, or we could say hey, you know what, we want to look at customers who are going from cart to order to see what that experience looks like and actually qualitatively also become aware of opportunities that we could go after.

Melanie Crissey: Yeah. Yeah. I love that and I've seen you do this in real life. I feel like the journey map is something that everyone talks about and I think until we started working together, I didn't know what the deliverable was. So we're talking about the research to actually make an artifact so you can understand why is somebody even on suitcase.com. But then your product, your website, you have all these analytics, you have maybe something like Fullstory that's going to alert you when friction goes up so you can proactively keep an eye on that as well. I love ... I think you really have to have both. Like if you were just going to have analytics or something like Fullstory, and you don't have the research to understand the story behind the data, you're going to be in a bad spot.

Melanie Crissey: So I do want to just take a second. We've been chatting for a minute. If you're just joining us, this is Fullstory Live, a LinkedIn live series. We're talking about friction today and Product Management. So send your questions over. I think I'm going to ask you one more question and then we'll do live Q&A. So if you have an idea or some friendly banter or comment, get it in because we're going to that section soon.

Melanie Crissey: So last thing I want to ask is, okay, so maybe we've identified a problem, we've prioritized the problem, so we even know, okay, we have bandwidth this week, we're going work on it. Maybe it doesn't move the needle when you fix it. So what happened? How do you go back and figure out what went wrong when you're trying to fix the friction and the fix isn't working?

Agata Bugaj: Yeah, that's another great question. I think the first thing that you have to identify is why were you not able to move the needle, right? To me ... buckets, there are two buckets and how I think about that. The first one is around, did we actually identify the problem correctly as well as the success criteria. So anytime you've identified an opportunity, you have some input that suggests that that's something you should do. So for instance, going back to the cart-to-order example, potentially cart-to-order dips and you go, oh, okay, well we're seeing this gap in sort of this KPI. So we've identified an opportunity and now we're going to go ahead and solve it. As part of that, you define your success criteria to say hey, if we build this thing, we expect cart-to-order to go up by 20, 30 bids, whatever it is. So there's a problem identification and the data that goes behind that.

Agata Bugaj: Then there's the actual thing that we built, the solution. It's possible that we actually didn't build the right thing. You identified the right opportunity and unsuccess criteria, but the solution just wasn't what it needs to be. So the path that you take is going to depend on which bucket you land in. So this one is all around, this is bucket number one, I talk with my hands, about really just validating-

Melanie Crissey: We both do.

Agata Bugaj: That's right. Confirming that you're going after the right thing and you're measuring correctly, and so that goes into making sure the analytics is set up correctly, that your dash boarding is set up correctly, that you've maybe didn't miss an input or made some assumption that actually ended up being false. And then here you go into ... let's assume that you did this correctly. So here you go into the solution, so then it's just a matter of understanding why didn't it actually move the needle. So what I love to do is watch sessions quite frankly. Do I say it or not? I'm not here to sell, but watching sessions is one really great way to understand what a customer is doing.

Agata Bugaj: At the same time, just talking to customers. So maybe as simple as leaning over and saying hey, can you use this and experience and tell me what you think? Or doing like a hallway stability test, or something else, and just getting some really quick feedback to see if it's something obvious or maybe if you just need to do a lot more research to understand why the thing that you built isn't actually solving the problem.

Melanie Crissey: Totally. This just lights a fire of shame in my heart. I want to share really quick, so this happened to me with the onboarding flow for Fullstory, we had our success criteria, we wanted to optimize for people getting Fullstory installed. So we actually had that part right and we had the right dashboard set up to see are they getting installed, but it was the solution that we got wrong and the way we caught it was not only by watching sessions, but also listening to our support team. So our Huggers here at Fullstory caught it and then I was able to go quantify it with Fullstory with the session data. What it actually was was we tried to introduce a one-click installation option, but it required your browser popups to be on and so everyone who tried to click that option failed and it was just like, ah, I'm so glad. I can't even imagine how long that would have taken me to catch if one, customers weren't really generous in giving their feedback to me, but two, if we didn't actually have the tool to be able to see how many people are going down this path to failure.

Melanie Crissey: So I think that's ... this is why I think this stuff is so important. So okay, so I want to check the doc and just here on my fancy, glitter space phone here, to see if anything's come in. We do have ... okay, so there's one question that I definitely want to make sure we address. It came in before the talk even started, and that's is there such a thing as good friction? And what do you think about that?

Agata Bugaj: Great ... oh, that's such a good question. I'm going to actually answer this in multiple ways. So one, as a product practitioner, but also just as a user of the Internet. As a product practitioner, you never want to create an experience that's going to irritate a customer, frustrate them, make them unhappy. So full stop, right? That's not the intent at all.

Melanie Crissey: That's not the goal.

Agata Bugaj: However ... that's right. That's not the goal. However, I would say also as a product practitioner anytime you get any input that helps you propel the product forward, that's a good input. All right, so if I take that lens, feedback is a gift. And so from that sense, I would say yes, absolutely, friction ... understanding where friction exists is a really, really good thing from a product practitioner's standpoint.

Agata Bugaj: As a user of the Internet, I would say that there are absolutely times where friction is a terrible thing and there's no way to spin it in a positive way, but I would say plenty of times also when friction really helps slow the user down in a way that's really valuable and meaningful to them. So as an example, if you're agreeing to something as part of like a sign up flow, you want to be reminded of what you're signing up for, as an example. So a modal pops up that's like, are you sure that you want to ... yes, please, thank you for reminding me. Or I forget my passwords all the time, and if I'm going to get locked out after three attempts, please tell me because then I'll just take a minute and I'll think about it and then I'll try to remember my password. I'll put a little bit more effort into it. So that's really helpful. It stops me in my tracks, but it's really there to help me and so I appreciate that.

Melanie Crissey: Yeah, that really helpful form feedback, because otherwise I really am just going to convince myself I remember what my password is or just type it wrong and try to cram it in. The other one I think about that I think has saved my butt a lot is where they slow you down when you want to delete something. It's like, okay, you're going to delete this, it's not going in the archive trashcan so you can revisit it later, it's gone forever. We're going to make you sign your name, give us your passport, and type delete the exact element because it's like, I don't want you to get in that situation where you deleted something you need. So slow UX definitely has a place in design and I think can be part of a delightful experience, even though it can be friction in that moment.

Melanie Crissey: Okay, so going back to data. I think this is one where I really feel like it's a weak spot for me, so I'm kind of asking to learn. So how do you know when you have enough data to make a decision about the friction you're trying to solve? Otherwise I feel like I could just research in a corner for months and never be confident enough to say got it.

Agata Bugaj: That's a good question. I would say at the highest level, it depends a lot on how much effort or investment will it take to do the thing that you potentially are going to do with that information. So as an example, if you have one or two customers, they email you and say something like, hey, the text on this button doesn't feel right. It seems like you're using the wrong words. You can take that piece of feedback, you could take a look at the text and the button, and you could say oh gosh, you know what? They're right. That is ... we have introduced friction unintentionally. That's going to take me a minute to fix, and you'll just go and do it, right? So you just need one or two pieces of feedback and you go with your gut and you're done.

Agata Bugaj: However, if you're going after an opportunity that's going to take, call it, 10 people for nine months, you're making a massive investment. At that point, you likely don't know how you're going to solve for the opportunity. You haven't gotten there yet, but you know. You know enough that it's going to be a massive investment and so you better make sure that you're looking at a lot of different inputs, a lot of different data points, so that you can feel pretty good about making that investment. Yeah. That's how I would think about it.

Melanie Crissey: Yeah. No, that makes sense. So it's like proportional to the amount of resources or people you need to mobilize, which I guess is just kind of common sense, just out of respect for people's time and the risk that you're putting into it.

Agata Bugaj: Yeah. I mean it's ... exactly. Time is money, and so if you're going to invest a lot of time, you have to make sure that you feel good about the decision that you're making. I will also say that I think also with time and with experience, you get better at kind of understanding what inputs really matter and which ones matter less. So you may actually get to a place where, call it, 10 years ago you would have ... I'm simplifying this, you would haven needed 10 inputs to feel pretty good about a decision, but you've learned enough where that you can take a few shortcuts and maybe now you only need four, but you've already invested over the last however many years, and getting those different inputs. So there's a little bit of that as well, I'd say.

Melanie Crissey: Okay, so now that makes me want to ask you something else, which I know you're going to hate that I'm asking this, because we agreed we weren't going to talk about it before we walked in the room. But is that a case for experimentation?

Agata Bugaj: 100 percent.

Melanie Crissey: Because sometimes you just need to prove to yourself that it's right. Maybe you run an experiment?

Agata Bugaj: Yeah, absolutely. So I am the biggest fan of AB testing as one form of experimentation, so absolutely, I think that there are definitely times when you should be AB testing where you don't have enough data, you don't have enough inputs, and we're really just putting something out there in the wild and letting customers kind of tell you is a really, really great thing to have. Number one fan of AB testing for sure. For sure.

Melanie Crissey: Yeah, I think what makes me scared about it is sometimes the amount of work. You really have to invest in developing two really good experiences in order to experiment without dropping the ball. So that almost doubles the risks sometimes in terms of what you're putting in just to find out which one works. So it's such a tricky thing.

Agata Bugaj: No, for sure. And I think sometimes it also comes down to well, what if you invest in this thing and it's the wrong thing to invest in, right?

Melanie Crissey: Right.

Agata Bugaj: So then you at least find out earlier. And you can set up AB test in different ways, too, such that you can actually minimize level of effort up front. So for instance, you could do things like fake door tests where you don't actually build the thing, but you get enough insight that customers want the thing that you're looking to build. So there are ... because you're right. You definitely don't want to spend too much of an effort building the AB test if you actually ... if there are other things that you could do. So there are ways to get it at some of that. For sure.

Melanie Crissey: And I feel like that's such a good strategy in marketing as well is just test demand for something. I think there's a great thing I've seen happen here in Atlanta where people will make a landing page for a SaaS product or a B to C product even, way before they've started building it just to collect emails and see if people are interesting. So the fake door ... I'm a big fan of the fake doors. Always curious to know what's behind the fake door.

Melanie Crissey: So we only have a couple minutes left. I do want to just kind of transition the conversation back to Product Management at large, and just see if you have any comments you want to share about what it's like to work in project management at Fullstory, and what people can do if they're interested in maybe getting in on the fun.

Agata Bugaj: Yeah, absolutely. So I think that it's amazing to work in Product Management at Fullstory. I think we have such a great team here as a whole, and then if I think about those folks that we work most closely with, the product managers, the designers, the engineers. I mean, just a phenomenal group of people that I've really enjoyed working with, have learned a ton from. So definitely net positive on the Product Management experience at Fullstory. I would say very few people, I think, growing up say I want to be a product manager, so folks find themselves getting into product in different ways, multiple ways to get into Product Management. I think one thing that I think works well and worked well for me personally was working in an organization where there is a product team, and working closely with that team, want to learn more about what it's like to be a PM and then the skills that make someone successful, and also to sort of help that team in whatever skillset you end up potentially having.

Agata Bugaj: And then just making sure that you understand enough about what it means to be a PM and then you kind of slowly, slowly make your way over. I've seen that work many times, not just for myself. That's the advice I would give to anybody is if you're interested in Product Management, make sure that you raise your hand, make sure that you are doing your due diligence, and working closely with that team. That's definitely one way to make it in Product Management.

Melanie Crissey: I think that's why I went back and was kind of watching the session with Tommy and Hannah. They were talking about his journey. He said no one wakes up thinking they want to do this.

Agata Bugaj: Exactly.

Melanie Crissey: He found his way in through consulting. Your background is in engineering. What if you're a super experienced PM and maybe you're just looking for a different work environment, something a little bit different? Is Fullstory hiring for people of that caliber at the moment?

Agata Bugaj: Oh my gosh, I'm so happy you said that, and that was not planted. Absolutely. So we are ... Fullstory's very much a rocket ship, as you know, and so the product team is absolutely growing. So yes, if you happen to be a kick-ass PM, we're definitely totally looking for kick-ass PMs. So, yeah.

Melanie Crissey: Check out Fullstory.com/jobs and-

Speaker 3: We do have any audience question.

Melanie Crissey: Oh, okay. Oh, we have an audience question come in. All right. Oh, okay. So Shiv is asking can you define with examples how you find friction in onboarding? I'm going to try to answer this real quick. So I use Fullstory to look for examples of friction in my onboarding, and I literally just build the biggest funnel ever from sign up to getting your magic moment, which it can be getting your script installed or it could also be just talking to a salesperson if that's how you prefer to buy. Then I look for the errors in the Rage Clicks. That's kind of my process. In a checkout flow, are there things, ways that you identify friction? Maybe in an onboarding sign up? Ideas? Things I missed?

Agata Bugaj: Yeah, no. I think you hit the nail on the head. I mean that's definitely a great way to find areas of friction. That's absolutely where you start-

Melanie Crissey: Just the job ... to where the drop off points are. In order to do that, you just need a funnel. So whether or not you're using a Fullstory funnel or some other analytics tool, you know big funnel is you just want to build it all the steps in, and then look for where the dips are, and then you can kind of slice and dice from there.

Agata Bugaj: Yeah. And you could always just watch customers, to sit next to them and see what they're doing and ask questions.

Melanie Crissey: Do a little traditional research.

Agata Bugaj: Yeah, but if you want to do the set, you know, two in the morning, that's not an option.

Melanie Crissey: Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yes. Usually. Usually not an option. Somebody mentioned ... a comment we got from somebody was that prototyping tools like Axure are really successful. Have you used something like that before?

Agata Bugaj: Oh, absolutely. Huge fan of prototyping. Multiple tools that you can use for that. But that's another really great way to get feedback from customers quickly before you build the thing. Yeah.

Melanie Crissey: You build your prototype.

Agata Bugaj: Yes.

Melanie Crissey: In Axure or InDesign or whatever it is that you-

Agata Bugaj: Invision, Figma.

Melanie Crissey: Invision. That's what I'm thinking. InDesign is something else. Figma, yeah. Whatever those are. Or draw it on a piece of paper.

Agata Bugaj: Yeah, paper prototype, and that's a thing.

Melanie Crissey: It's never led me astray. I think that might be all of our audience questions. We are getting kind of close to time. If you have ... I'm going to look for one last minute, if you have something like a burning desire, something you're thinking about, you want to comment it in. I'm going to give it just a second before we wrap up. I think, too, you know, the conversation does not end here. So if you have ideas, things come up after this recording, or you're visiting this later, you can always comment, send a comment of Fullstory's LinkedIn feed. We watch that pretty regularly. Or send us a Tweet. We have a whole team of Huggers that help us respond to our Tweets. We are always interested to hear from customers and just folks who are doing this about what's working for them. Reach out. If there are no other questions, then what I'll do is just kind of close it up.

Melanie Crissey: Agata, I just want to say thank you so much for sitting here with me today. This was really fun. It was kind of a good break in the workflow. I'm going to ... do you have any final thoughts, like last parting?

Agata Bugaj: Oh gosh. Parting thoughts. I mean this has been great. And to your point, the conversation doesn't stop here, and so definitely if anyone has comments or questions or ways that they think about this that might be different, I would love to learn more. I'm always looking to learn.

Melanie Crissey: Yeah, challenge us.

Agata Bugaj: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Melanie Crissey: Okay. Great. Then yeah, I think that's it. Leave your comments, follow us on LinkedIn, stay in touch with Fullstory. We've got content like this shipping out all the time.

Agata Bugaj: Yep. Thanks, Melanie.

Melanie Crissey: Let's get back to it ... thank you. Thanks.

Fullstory for Mobile Apps

Fullstory — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Fullstory gives you the insights you need to create an app worth downloading. Watch to find out how.

The power of cross-functional collaboration

Hunter Garrett — Tue, 04 Jun 2019 05:00:00 GMT

“As a product manager we can get too focused on the building of features and not enough focus on establishing relationships across the company.” — Justin Dilley, Head of Product at Fullstory

How does cross-functional collaboration work at a growing software company like Fullstory? Hanna Woodburn, Product Marketing Manager at Fullstory, sat down with Justin Dilley, Fullstory Head of Product and former product manager at The Home Depot and Amazon, to discuss this and other issues in our recent LinkedIn Live that originally aired on May 22, 2019.

Justin and Hanna focused on cross-functional collaboration, and covering topics including:

What cross-functional collaboration looks like at Fullstory.
The challenges of cross-functional collaboration—including remote work.
How to balance building strong cross-functional relationships with a high-performance company culture.

Watch the full session below—or read through the transcript, which you'll find below it. And follow Fullstory on LinkedIn and Twitter to catch more sessions as we cover topics from product management to product metrics, OKRs, and more.

Tune in!

Watch the Replay

Read the Transcript

Hanna Woodburn: Hi. Thanks for joining. I'm Hanna Woodburn. I work in product marketing here at Fullstory. I'm so excited to be here with Justin Dilley, our Head of Product. This is our first LinkedIn Live session. So we're thrilled to be here. This is the first of a series of conversations that we're going to have with product managers about skills and tips and challenges that they face. So thanks for joining me today.

Justin Dilley: Yeah, super excited to be here and chatting with you guys in this LinkedIn Live situation, and chatting with you about all things product management, Hanna.

Hanna Woodburn: That's awesome. So like I said, this will be a first in a series of sessions. It is obviously live, so if you have questions, please leave them below. Leave us comments. If you don't follow Fullstory yet on LinkedIn, give us a follow and we'll get started. So for people who aren't familiar with Fullstory, we are a digital intelligence platform and we help eCommerce and SaaS companies understand their digital experiences and improve it. You're the Head of Product. How long have you been at Fullstory?

Justin Dilley: I've been at Fullstory just a little over a year. I joined in March of last year as product manager number one.

Hanna Woodburn: That's awesome. Yeah, I remember you interviewed me, it was your second or third week. So what did you do before you came to Fullstory?

Justin Dilley: So I've been in product management for the last, I don't know, maybe five-ish years. Before Fullstory, I was at Home Depot. I was a product manager leading their mobile app team. And then before Home Depot I was at Amazon, doing a number of different product related roles, everything from their Kindle Fire tablets to their dash replenishment service. And so I've got a pretty broad history of B to C and B to B experience in the broad management world.

Hanna Woodburn: Awesome. So this conversation is about cross-functional collaboration.

Justin Dilley: Great topic.

Hanna Woodburn: I love this topic because we work together, product marketing and product management work really closely at Fullstory, and it's just a topic that's near and dear to my heart. And I know that you care about it a lot as well. So when we think about product management and cross-functional collaboration, what has that traditionally looked like?

Justin Dilley: I think for most product managers that means working with your engineering team, working with your design team, you would consider those your core team that you work with every day. I think one of the things that's most interesting about product management is it's naturally a very cross-functional role just by its nature. At the end of the day most product managers don't have a full team reporting to them. And so the way they get things done is actually through influence of other people working cross-functionally across the organization. But I think traditionally when people think about product management and cross collaboration, the core team is really design, engineering and product management.

Hanna Woodburn: So who are you working with cross-functionally at Fullstory?

Justin Dilley: That's a good question. It's interesting, at Fullstory, it's maybe slightly different than some of the other roles that I've had before, where in traditional roles or in other roles that I've had where you have more of a traditional product line reporting structure, where you work for a director of product management who works for a VP of Product Management, and you might own a specific product line and you'll go deep with your engineering and design colleagues, but you don't have as much interaction maybe outside of that core team. I think one of the nice things that I really love about Fullstory is the structure that we have in place allows you to, and essentially forces you to in a lot of ways, to think beyond your core team of design and engineering, and think about marketing and sales and product marketing and interacting with those folks that again, aren't necessarily traditionally your sweet spot of who you collaborate with.

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah. So if you're thinking about, you're hiring product managers here at Fullstory, what are the skills that you look for that make someone you're like, okay, this person's going to be really good at it, at getting buy in from different parts of the organization and working really well cross-functionally?

Justin Dilley: Yeah, that's a good question. I think the handful of things I look for in a product manager, one is a good solid technical foundation. I mean Fullstory as a product is just naturally a technical product. And so being able to converse on a high level and a pretty low level with smart engineers and really functional designers I think is a super important skill set. And then the second thing is really that cross collaboration skillset. Somebody that has the ability to influence the organization without a ton of formal authority. So looking for folks that have built that skillset within their product management career. And then maybe the last thing is kind of spidey sense, like what is their real spidey sense for what a well designed and built product is. And probing in and around some of those areas.

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah, that's great. I think from my perspective, you guys do a really great job of working cross-functionally. And one of the things that I think about in terms of cross-functional collaboration is it's so relationship driven, you need to have those strong ties to other parts of the business. And part of that is just having good relationships with people. That's a great way to get information shared and to get buy in and things like that. How do you balance that sort of relational component of cross-functional collaboration with trying to ship new features and the goals and KPIs that you're tracking towards?

Justin Dilley: I mean I think you certainly have to do both in a lot of ways. And I think it really comes from a foundation of trying to establish a relationship based on trust. Where I trust you and you trust me and we're operating from the same set of principles, if you will. And that takes time. And you definitely have to work at that. And so you want to balance that and it's easy, I think in some ways, as a product manager to get too focused on the building of features and not enough focus spent or time spent on establishing relationships across the company or even just communicating with your cross-functional peers.

Justin Dilley: It's really easy to get siloed into your team and not necessarily think beyond, hey, we've got a product marketing team that needs to be looped in on new features and functionality we're rolling out. We've got a giant sales team that we're working with. They need to be educated on what we're building and when it's going to ultimately roll out to customers. And so I think it's definitely a balance and I think what I try and do is spend some intentional time actually not as focused on the building of the features and maybe a little bit more intentional time spent on creating those cross-functional relationships. And again, a foundation of trust, I think is something that's big and that really can go a long ways when you think about building a successful company and certainly building successful products.

Hanna Woodburn: Just a reminder, this is live. So if you have any comments, if you have specific tips about cross-functional collaboration, please share those below. Any questions for Justin? Add those as well and we'll get to them later in this session. So we talked a little bit about working with sales, and we have a growing sales team here who we're constantly trying to enable. How do you think it's best to communicate with sales teams, in particular when you're a product manager?

Justin Dilley: Yeah, I think one of the traps that I think a lot of product folks fall into is in the over promise and under deliver stance where you talk about building features and functionality and you're constantly getting feedback from sales about what's resonating with customers, ultimately what they want to see in the product. And I think it's making sure that you establish a clear set of principles into how you talk about what's on your roadmap or the things that you're currently working on. How do you inform sales or get sales enough information to make sure that they feel comfortable talking about the generalities of some of the things that we have going on here at Fullstory, but making sure that that process is really two way. Where it's not just product saying, Oh, here's the roadmap and this is when you're going to get these features delivered in this particular quarter.

Justin Dilley: But it's really that conversational element about, hey, here's what we're thinking about. You guys talk to customers every day and you're having the hard conversations about where our product is a good fit, but maybe where it isn't a good fit and how do we really close the loop on that feedback. So sales feels like they do have and they should have a voice in informing what we work on next. It's that balance of getting their feedback and input, synthesizing that into a clear coherent product roadmap is one input and then pushing that back out to them and it's that constant process of getting their feedback and then pushing on your information to them that I think is what I spend some time on and what the team spends some time on.

Hanna Woodburn: I feel like there's a trend that we're seeing here of, great communication is critical.

Justin Dilley: Yeah, it is. I mean I think when you think about cross-functional relationships, communication is at the heart of everything and it can be a bit of a failure mode, I think, for product managers when they get too insular with what they're working on and they don't take the time to step back and say, actually I should poll the product marketing team and they might be able to help with messaging on this or help me think about this brand new functionality that I'm working on. How might this resonate with customers? Or maybe I'll pull somebody in from the sales team to get their perspective because they're talking to prospects. And again, I think by making sure that you're spending that intentional time establishing, building and facilitating the relationships cross-functionally, I think it makes you a better product manager.

Hanna Woodburn: So if you see a product manager become insular and they're just focusing too much on getting stuff done and not really looking outward to what else is happening in the business, how do you coach them through that?

Justin Dilley: Yeah, I think there's some things to kind of break the mold there, and one is getting them to spend some more time with cross-functional peers in context to having customer conversations. So one of the things that I talk to my team about all the time is, jump into a sales conversation with somebody on the sales team. Join a product marketing exercise that you guys go through on your side. And I think that gives you a very different perspective and can break a little bit of the routine of saying, okay, well I'm going to go do my customer discovery work or I'm going to work with my engineering and design team to build this particular feature. It's getting them out into the field with sales or just on conversations with sales. Getting them more integrated into the marketing team I think can break a lot of the badness of not having those cross-functional relationships.

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah, I think that's something that I experience as well when I am feeling like, okay, I'm just too focused on what I'm doing. If I hop on a sales call, I immediately see areas where, oh, we could be adding value as product marketers or, gosh, I didn't realize this was a question that's coming up, or people really love this part of the product. It's very illuminating and I think that it's something that really all of us who work on customer facing products should do regularly for that reason.

Justin Dilley: Even getting out of the office, you and I have spent some time at conferences and on the road, and I think that's actually a really interesting place to pressure test your five second message, your 30-second message, your two minute quick demo. And as a product manager, getting out of the office, getting into that conference environment and just having to explain what Fullstory is, how it works, why we're different, how we can add value, and then be able to actually show customers, gets you a very different perspective in a lot of ways on what you're building as a product manager.

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah, definitely. That totally resonates with me. If you're watching and that resonates with you, please let us know. If you have any tips for fostering cross-functional collaboration that have been really successful for your organization, leave those below, as well as any questions. So let's talk about roadblocks to cross-functional collaboration. It's really great, yes, everybody should be doing this. However, there's only so many hours in the day. What are challenges that you've seen for fostering cross-functional collaboration, especially as the team grows and scales?

Justin Dilley: I mean I think just naturally as the team gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it's hard to stay connected one on one with individuals. And so if you think about your core team as beyond just the product family here, we call them families here at Fullstory. We'll get into that a little bit probably. But just focusing on, let's identify who my core team is that is not just a part of the people that I might traditionally think of working with day to day and it's like, okay, my core team's actually product marketing. Maybe you've got an advocate from sales, maybe you have somebody in the marketing team, maybe if somebody in our business operations team, but thinking broadly about them as being the core team is a challenge for sure in terms of being able to spend your time throughout the day. But I think that is the real way to stop the cycle of not getting feedback from other folks and not having an input from the other team.

Justin Dilley: And so again, I think it really comes down to just being intentional about what you want to do, who you want to involve in it, and then ultimately making sure that you progress on that. But I think in terms of challenges, I'm trying to think. Challenges that I recently faced, I faced, this is just a personal growth area for me, is outward communication, really broad communication. In my role, I spend a lot of time working with the rest of the other heads of family here. And you know, being able to find my voice as a product leader and being able to communicate out broadly across the entire product team, but also the company, and really finding the right rhythm and cadence and messaging about what we're working on, ultimately why it's important and why it matters to everybody here at the company, at Fullstory. And so that's something that I find is a natural roadblock to establishing those and definitely something that I work on pretty frequently.

Hanna Woodburn: So you've hinted at our structure here, which is certainly unique. Why don't you talk a little bit about how you think that helps foster cross-functional collaborative?

Justin Dilley: I mentioned this before, in traditional kind of product management organizations where you might be aligned by a product line and you'll report up through a traditional product management structure. We've got a little bit of a different organizational design here at Fullstory. So we call it the matrix, as you know, and it's organized on two axes, one axis being the practice axis. So that the practice of product management, the practice of engineering, the practice of design, think about that access as being your more traditional reporting structure, who you identify with, what your title might be on LinkedIn. And so that's on one axis. And then on the other axis we have families. So these are organizations set up to achieve a set of business outcomes. And so I'm the head of family for the product family, which can and does include a number of different folks from different practices.

Justin Dilley: So we're heavy in engineering and design and product management, but we also have designers in the design practice live in the marketing family. And so there's another head of family that leads up the marketing family, but the ability to have somebody in the design practice or the engineering practice live in multiple families, I think breaks down a little bit of the silos that get built up when you're in a traditional product line organization.

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah, definitely. How do you see cross-functional collaboration evolving at Fullstory? Do you have a sense of what it looks like in the future?

Justin Dilley: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I'll tell you one of the things that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about is as we establish more of a remote culture here at Fullstory. That's something we're really big on, is how do we find the best people. They don't necessarily have to be here in Atlanta, and let them be remote. It's really finding the right tools and mechanisms to communicate and establish those cross-functional relationships for folks that aren't here and the folks that you don't see every day, folks that you may just see on a video conference and they may only come to Atlanta once a quarter. And so being able to establish some norms and processes around coming up with and establishing a really effective remote work culture, and establishing those cross collaboration exercises. Again, I think if you're not spending the time actively doing it, then it just falls by the wayside. And so you have to be intentional about spending time and it makes it even harder when folks are remote, for sure.

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah, that's definitely a great point. I think that as we do move to have more people remote, it's one of those things where you think a lot about, oh, are they going to be involved in this meeting and how do we dial people in and make sure that we're communicating clearly with them. But it changes the dynamic of those relationships as well. And so you have to be hyper focused on fostering healthy relationships in a lot of different ways.

Justin Dilley: It was interesting. You know, we just moved in to new office here and we were remote as a whole company for a week, and it was really challenging to operate in a way where you take for granted that you can't just walk over to somebody's desk and ask them a question and get some of those collaborative meetings done. And that was a real trying exercise, I think, in a lot of ways. One of the things that I found was really nice is we did this video kickoff, run the OKR process and we did that video kickoff for the company, kind of asynchronously. I thought that was actually a really effective way at communicating, in some ways collaborating across the entire company. And so I'm hopeful we can do some more of those. And I think that helps remote folks as well.

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah, definitely. I have so much more empathy for remote people after that week because it definitely was a struggle. So speaking of empathy, we have a few watchwords here at Fullstory: clarity, empathy and bionics. Which of those do you think is most applicable to your work on cross-functional collaboration? Is there one that sticks out above the rest?

Justin Dilley: I think if I was going to stack rank them, in some ways it's probably clarity, empathy, and then bionics. I think establishing clarity among the decisions you're making and why you're making them and ultimately getting work done, if you're not clear and you don't have clarity, that can such a big problem for achieving all of the great things that we want to achieve here and value we want to add for our customers at Fullstory.

Justin Dilley: And so I think a lot of it starts from the base of clarity, and then empathy is maybe just a very close second, is both empathizing with your peers, and empathizing with your customers and making sure that that is really well understood and rooted in being truly empathetic about everything that they have going on. There's always the, Oh, the last minute requests that you have that comes in, or you have to say no to somebody. I mean, those can be really hard things, and if you're not super empathetic to what they're trying to do or the outcome that they're trying to achieve, I think that can create a real problem for collaboration.

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah, for sure. So we've talked a lot about why a cross-functional collaboration is good for us internally. Do you think that helps us build better products?

Justin Dilley: I think so. And I think even extending collaboration into the customer realm, like having customers involved more frequently beyond just the walls of Fullstory. So thinking about Fullstory as being able to execute on a particular set of things and achieve an outcome that we want. But how do we bring our customers into that conversation? And that's one of the things I think a lot about and we've got our hugging family, which is really our customer support and success, as a really high leverage area for us to go and have that conversation with customers and be collaborative with them.

Justin Dilley: I think it's really easy to think again about cross-functional collaboration as just your core team, and maybe you're thinking about it as the company, but how can you start to pull in customers and make what you're working on and the things that you think are important? Make that a little bit more of a two way dialogue with your customers, I think is something that we spend a lot of time thinking about, and empathy to your point is one of our watch words. And so empathizing with our customers and being able to loop them in on these things is something that I think is super important.

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah. That's awesome. I love that. So one last question from me and then we'll move to questions from the audience. Can you think of a time when cross-functional collaboration was an absolute failure? Doesn't have to be here at Fullstory. It could be any time in your career where it just didn't happen and it was not good as a result.

Justin Dilley: I won't go into too many specifics, but there was a product that I was working on, and we were basically getting ready for the final launch process. We were putting kind of the finishing touches on the product and we were ready to kind of release it to the world, only to find out that the marketing team, who would do all of the marketing of what we were building, was just not ready. And at the end of the day we hadn't really brought them along. And so it was really a problem for me, in that I didn't do a good enough job communicating expectations on dates. And dates are always this shifting thing and so just really could have done a much better job communicating with them.

Justin Dilley: I mean, it ultimately all worked out and we scrambled. But that's a real way to damage a relationship in a lot of ways. And so I think about that instance when I'm working even with product marketing today and working with you and your team and thinking about, I don't want you guys to be the last ones to find out about our plans as a product team and wanting to make sure that you guys are riding shotgun, I think is is a big learning that I learned from this experience.

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah, that's great. All right, so we'll turn to questions that we have from the audience. If you have questions, you're watching this, please feel free to type them in. So the first one is, how has data and metrics storytelling enabled cross-functional collaboration towards a same sense of purpose?

Justin Dilley: Well, I mean I think data is a common language among the teams and can be a really good tie breaker if you're not really sure which direction to go. And so if everybody is looking at the same data, using the same source of data, it can be a way to really drive clear, effective decision making. You know, people talk a lot about being a data driven organization, and I think that is something that's super important. I think in some ways that gets a bit abused to be only looking at data. And so I think it's very much a balance of being a data informed organization, and really thinking through how do you use data to understand your customers to understand what their pain points are.

Justin Dilley: So when you're building products or thinking about building products that everybody's on the same page of what the problem is. And I think that can be kind of the great democratizer out there. If you can get everybody to clearly understand and articulate what the problem is with data and then figuring out why that's a problem we're solving, again with a set of data, that makes the entire product development process just a ton easier.

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah, I think that resonates with me as well. If I think about how we've worked together and just thinking through, how do we go to market with a feature, having data about how people are using it in a Beta and what their feedback is and what are the stories that we're starting to get out of those users is really helpful for me to say, okay, this is the vision they have, and then help translate that vision into the sales team and the marketing team and make sure that we're all reading off of the same sheet of music.

Justin Dilley: Yeah, exactly. And again, I think it can be that common language among different teams and can really be a way to hammer home some certain points about like, we really need to hit customers with this particular message because boy, you know, there they gave us feedback or we see in the data that we have at Fullstory. And so I think it's a really, really good approach.

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah. And it also can say, we need to change this or fix this. It's great for motivating on that end too. All right. So Jacob has a question. Are there any specific tools Fullstory uses to help the functionality of their communications?

Justin Dilley: That's a good question. So we're a pretty big slack heavy company, and I would say in general we spend a lot of time thinking about asynchronous communication. And I think that's one thing that if you think about building muscles to help with communication, is it really is that asynchronous communication. And so for us, the core tools that we use everyday are slack and Gmail and the whole G suite of Google docs and Google slides. Our main kind of project a database is a tool called the clubhouse. And so there's a ton of asynchronous communication that happens, either direct feedback in a document or a note on a particular clubhouse card or epic. That's how we manage most of our features and functionality that we're delivering to customers. And so I think it's really getting good at that asynchronous communication. It's easy to schedule a 30 minute meeting, but you don't always need that 30 minute meeting. And in some ways you can get a lot more done asynchronously, and so I think that's a good muscle to build when you think about collaboration and communication is building those asynchronous muscles.

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah. How do you create buy in for those tools? Do you ever experience resistance where people are like, I don't want to log my tasks in clubhouse, or, I would rather use email over slack, or how do you change the social norms?

Justin Dilley: Yeah, that's a good question. I think if you focus on, there's always a problem when you think about the product development process, there's a problem, hey, we don't have a good sense of how big certain things are. Maybe we're not great at our project management muscles. And so if you can get folks to agree on, yeah, this is a problem, then you can start to suggest particular solutions and they don't always have to be a tool. It could just be a Google doc or a slack channel. But I think having everybody come from the same place as, this is a problem. I'm not able to do my job as effectively as I could. Then you can start to open people's minds and then selecting certain software, their minds will be just naturally more open.

Justin Dilley: You can say, Hey, well this tool actually does exactly what we would want and we all agreed that this was a problem, so let's give this a try and try and Beta test it. And then I think you have to give people the flexibility to do things that work for them. I think if you come up with a, everybody should do it this way, that doesn't really work for everybody, and I think you end up in a place where you've got a process or a tool that just doesn't work for anybody. And so having some built in flexibility into what people can use from a tool standpoint, how they use it, just making sure that you've got enough flexibility built into that, so that everybody feels like, Hey, for my team or my area, I can get what I need out of this.

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah, definitely. There's a comment here that I think is great. Celebrate your successes with cross-functional collaboration. When you launch or complete a project, make sure you give the kudos for the success of the team working together. That's from Steve with Bradley Corporation.

Justin Dilley: Yeah, that's great. Yeah it is something that is easy to forget. We at Fullstory, we do this Friday meeting, we call hug it out every Friday, and we've got a little section as part of our standing agenda to do toasts and I know that the team takes that really seriously, where it's your chance to recognize a coworker or a set of coworkers for something that you did during the week, and you can recognize them across the whole company. It doesn't have to just be centered around a specific product launch, but taking those moments for, people end up, I mean I know I do. You spend your blood, sweat and tears on something and taking a little bit of time to celebrate those successes and celebrate failures in a lot of ways, I think it's pretty important. Great comment Steven, thanks.

Hanna Woodburn: One last comment, Angela from Curtis says, Justin, I love your product. What are your thoughts on good process versus bad process as your company grows?

Justin Dilley: Oh man, that's good. That's a really tough question. I think in the good process camp is coming up with a set of, for lack of a better word, processes that everybody feels like, this is the way to build successful products. So for us at Fullstory, where that comes to life is we establish a set of annual, quarterly, and then five week-ish OKRs, and so if you spend time on the outcomes that you want to achieve or the objectives in the OKR process and then think through what the key results are, that will help you achieve those objectives. That's a really good process to stay focused on making sure you're building the right things. And then a bad process in a lot of ways is not communicating. You know, I've talked about it, we talk about that, and Hannah and I talked about that here, is if you get so insulated into just your product team and you don't pop your head up to communicate broadly across any organization, I think that could be a bit of a bad process.

Hanna Woodburn: Great. Well, thank you so much for sharing your time and insights with us today.

Justin Dilley: Thanks for chatting.

Hanna Woodburn: I really appreciate it. Thanks to everyone who watched and submitted comments and questions. Please feel free to continue the conversation on our LinkedIn page. If you liked this content, follow us on LinkedIn. There'll be more LinkedIn Lives coming next week, and we'll be talking with more product managers about topics relevant to them. Thanks everybody.

Justin Dilley: Thanks guys.

Measuring your mobile experience

Fullstory — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 05:00:00 GMT

Are your mobile analytics giving you the full story about your customer’s app experience? Are you measuring the things that matter most to your mobile users?

In this webinar, Kyle Henderson, Principal Product Manager at Fullstory, takes you through the must-have metrics for understanding engagement and conversion in your mobile application.

Watch Webinar

What's Covered

Topics discussed in this webinar include:

Why what you measure matters and how choosing the wrong metrics can lead to costly mistakes down the road.
The most important metrics for understanding user engagement and conversion.
How the best metrics help you build a business case for continued investment in mobile experience optimization.

How to build an empathy-based, data-backed customer journey map

Fullstory — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 05:00:00 GMT

If you’re looking for ways to improve conversion, increase purchases and build customer loyalty, you’ve got to start with your customer journey. Building a customer journey map makes creating effective, empathetic marketing messaging and programs effortless. Even better, it illuminates the gaps in your strategy and makes it perfectly clear where improvements are needed. Below, Jennifer Pyron from brand performance agency Mighty & True leads us through building an empathy-based, data-backed customer journey map – and how to use data to make it actionable.

Watch Webinar

What's Covered

Topics discussed in this webinar include:

An easy, repeatable way to map your customer journey and identify the top opportunities for improvement.
How to ensure your customer journey map is a living, breathing guide to taking action and making improvements, not a static artifact that gets forgotten as a one-time exercise.
The essential practice of validating your customer journey insights with customer data and prioritizing the top opportunities for improvement based on potential impact.

5 habits of successful product-led companies

Fullstory — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 05:00:00 GMT

For Product-Led Companies, nothing matters more than the product experience. But whether or not your company is product-led today, there are a few key habits that any company can adopt to gain a better understanding of their product experience and improve the inner workings of their organization.

Join us as leaders from Fullstory and Pendo share their thoughts on the 5 Key Habits of Successful Product-Led Companies.

Watch Webinar

What's Covered

Topics discussed in this webinar include:

How a simple bi-weekly meeting can help drive real change in your digital experience.
One easy way to turn customer feedback into data-driven evidence for change.
Which data points to track and share to motivate every team to improve the customer experience.

How to build better products by focusing on the why

Fullstory — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 05:00:00 GMT

Are you solving the right problem for your users?

Fullstory’s Head of Product, Justin Dilley, shares how a few simple changes to asking the right questions at the beginning can change everything about how you define, design, develop, test, and launch products at your company.

In this webinar, you'll learn:

To think differently about defining the problem your product is trying to solve.
One simple statement can bring clarity to your product management process.
To use the 9 Blocker to prioritize feature work and drives alignment across your organization.

Watch the webinar:

Fullstory's product roadmap and beyond

Fullstory — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 05:00:00 GMT

Fullstory's product roadmap and beyond

Founded by ex-Googlers in 2014, Fullstory has always been designed by and for product, marketing, engineering, and CX teams. Hear an update from SVP of Product Experience Agata Bugaj as she shares how Fullstory's DXI platform will continue to evolve to meet changing DX needs in the months and years to come.

Featured Speakers:

Agata Bugaj, Senior Vice President, Product at Fullstory

Fullstory portfolio: Enhance decision-making with behavioral data

Fullstory — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 05:00:00 GMT

Integrate AI-ready data to refine user profiles, boost personalization, and streamline experiences.

Enterprise plan: Transform your data strategy

Fullstory — Wed, 15 May 2024 05:00:00 GMT

Designed for large brands, this plan offers top-tier data capture, access controls, & premium analytics.

Data Direct: The next chapter in personalization

Fullstory — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 05:00:00 GMT

This offering gives you a full view of behavioral data to leverage user sentiment in real-time.

GDPR and Fullstory

Fullstory — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 07:00:00 GMT

About the General Data Protection Regulation and Fullstory

Last updated May 2021

First, a disclaimer: The content below is provided for informational purposes only. The information shared here is not meant to serve as legal advice. You should work closely with legal and other professional counsel to determine exactly how the GDPR may or may not apply to you.

In this article: If you’ve landed here, you’ve likely already heard lots about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). There is already a lot of great content that explains in detail what the GDPR is. Here, we’ll mostly focus on the intersection of the GDPR, your company, and your use of Fullstory session replay.

1. What is the GDPR?

At a basic level, the GDPR is intended to give more control to EU citizens over their personal data. Among other things, it regulates how people and organizations can obtain, use, store and eliminate personal data of EU citizens. The ideas in the GDPR actually aren’t so new. Many of the concepts in the GDPR were introduced over 20 years ago when the EU adopted the Data Protection Directive in the mid-1990s.

The GDPR seems to represent a real sea change, giving people strong agency in how their personal data is collected and used. Unlike the Directive from the mid-90s, the GDPR:

is much more specific about what is okay and not okay,
introduces a broader definition of personal data,
sets forth such stringent requirements that companies are required to make real operational changes,
is completely uniform across the EU, leaving a lot less wiggle room for interpretation, and
enforces penalties that are really, really steep; it’s clear that the EU wants to ensure real change.

2. What does the GDPR require?

A bunch of stuff, but because it’s new, it can be hard to say exactly how the GDPR requirements map onto specific operational changes. Some of the key concepts are:

Being really clear about what constitutes personal data.
Being really clear about ensuring that personal data is used only with a user’s explicit consent or some other lawful basis for processing it.
Keeping data secure.
Giving EU citizens a set of rights with respect to their personal data, including things like:
the right to see what data a company has collected about them,
the right to control how that data is shared with other companies,
the right to have all of their data deleted.

Let's take a closer look at how these GDPR requirements can be applied to Fullstory and session replay.

What is considered “personal data?”

According to the GDPR, personal data is any information relating to an identified or identifiable individual, which could mean any information that could be used either on its own or in conjunction with other data, to identify an individual.

Sensitive personal data, such as social security numbers, health information, or information that suggests a person’s racial or ethnic origin will require even greater protection under the GDPR. This kind of sensitive personal data should never be captured by Fullstory (it’s against our Acceptable Use Policy) and we have provided some easy-to-use tools that allow you to exclude sensitive data from ever being recorded by Fullstory.

Before we go further, just what is recorded by Fullstory and why? The power of Fullstory is linked to "session replay" (a.k.a. session playback).

What is session replay?

Session replay is the reproduction of a user’s interactions on a website or web application exactly as the user actually experienced it. Session replay transforms logged user events, such as mouse movements, clicks, page visits, scrolling, tapping, etc., into a reproduction of what the user did on the site or app.

The reproductions provided by session replay are used to recreate the experiences of actual users. Replay is useful for all sorts of reasons—e.g. to support customers, debug errors, optimize pages, and more.

In order for any session replay tool to work, session replay vendors must log user behaviors on websites and apps down to clicks, taps, scrolls, mouse movements, and more.

How might you capture personal data With Fullstory session replay?

There are two types of personal data you can send to Fullstory. You can actively send things like name, email address, company, etc. to Fullstory using our API or one of our integrations. You can also passively send personal information that your visitors are typing into fields or that might get displayed on pages of your website or app that Fullstory logs simply because we are recording the page.

As mentioned above, in the case of passively captured information, you have full control over which fields or elements are excluded, and it is important that you exclude the personal data that you do not want captured.

As a Fullstory customer, how should I think about Fullstory with respect to the GDPR?

For Fullstory customers, Fullstory is a processor of data that you send to us about your users. To understand how Fullstory session replay operates with respect to the data you send it, a helpful metaphor is to think of Fullstory as a provider of safe deposit boxes.

When you use Fullstory on your site, you are sending data about your users (which may or may not be personal data) into your Fullstory account, which is like your very own safe deposit box.

In the same way that a bank doesn’t access the contents of your safe deposit box, Fullstory doesn’t access the data in your Fullstory account. You’ll work directly with your customers to honor their requests about the data you have captured and stored about them whether it is in your Fullstory account or not. We will help by providing tools that allow you to easily access, change, remove and delete the data in your Fullstory account at your user’s request.

Because Fullstory is a processor, you may need to obtain consent from your identified users for the way that you plan to use Fullstory to process their data. If so, we suggest you be as clear as possible about how you use Fullstory and why your end users might want to grant you consent to identify them for those purposes.

For example, if you use Fullstory on your support team, you could explain that you use Fullstory session replay to provide faster and better support to your customers and aid your engineering team in solving bugs and improving their user experience. We believe that being more descriptive about how you’re using data to ultimately help your customers will improve the likelihood that they grant consent.

Do I need to obtain consent before recording sessions with Fullstory?

Not necessarily. The GDPR is primarily concerned with personal data and defining the rights that an EU citizen has to their own data. An unidentified session that cannot be traced to a certain individual is just that, unidentified, and as such recording that session for the purpose of session replay/session playback is a-ok.

However, as noted above, it is possible to capture personal or sensitive data passively if you are recording forms or pages where personal data is inputed or displayed on your website or application. It is important that you audit your own site and ensure all appropriate form fields or elements are excluded before you start recording.

But what about IP Address?

This is a great question and it seems this is still up for interpretation. However, in Fullstory you have the ability to discard IP addresses. While we hold the IP address while a session is processed, once processing is complete the IP address is discarded.

3. How will Fullstory empower me to honor my users' requests around their own personal data?

Under the GDPR, EU citizens have certain rights with respect to their own data. As you think about Fullstory’s role in helping you honor your users’ rights, it is helpful to revisit the safe deposit box metaphor.

When you choose, with consent or some other lawful basis, to record or pass into Fullstory personal data about your visitors, that data goes into your Fullstory account. As mentioned above, you’ll work directly with your customers to honor their requests about the data you have captured and stored about them whether it is in your Fullstory account or not. Fullstory will help by providing tools that allow you to easily access, change, remove and delete that data at your user’s request.

Let’s dive into some specific rights introduced via the GDPR and how Fullstory will help you honor those rights.

Right to be forgotten

Fullstory users with admin privileges can entirely erase users from their account at the click of a button after confirmation.

After a user is completely deleted, a discreet email is sent acting as a receipt to confirm that the appropriate action has been taken. We also offer an API endpoint for deleting users.

Right to object

Under the GDPR, users have the right to prohibit certain data uses. As mentioned above, you may need to get explicit consent from EU citizens regarding the data you capture and how you plan to use it.

We already covered how you might send personal data into your Fullstory account (actively via our Identify API or an integration, or passively by capturing pages on which personal data is inputted or displayed). It is already possible to choose not to actively or passively send any personal data into Fullstory simply by not using our Identify API and by excluding all elements (like form fields or confirmation pages) that might have personal information typed into or displayed on them.

You’ll be able to set more granular rules about what data is passed into Fullstory by default and what data can be passed into Fullstory when consent is present. This functionality will be part of our new Consent API (more details coming).

Right of access

Your users may contact you to request to access information that you hold about them. You’ll be able to log into your Fullstory account and quickly do a search for your user in order to understand what personal data of theirs you’ve sent to Fullstory and help construct your response to your user.

Data portability

As mentioned above, any end user data that is in your Fullstory account, is yours (and theirs), but not ours. You will be able to quickly understand what data you do have about your user thanks to our search functionality and Data Export. Then you can hand it over to the customer however you choose.

Please read "GDPR Made to Order" to learn about how the Fullstory app works to accommodate GDPR.

4. Does Fullstory offer a Data Processing Agreement (DPA)?

Yes. You can view and sign our DPA online: Fullstory Data Processing Agreement.

Once you follow that link, you'll need to authenticate your access using an emailed verification code. You will have the chance to read the document prior to signing.

5. How will I know if I’m compliant with the GDPR?

There does not yet appear to be any sort certification process by which you can be assured that you are in compliance. As we mentioned earlier, you should work closely with legal and other professional counsel to determine if you’re in compliance with the GDPR.

Each company that wants to serve EU citizens will need to remain vigilant and pay attention to how GDPR may evolve, and make changes to accommodate any additional clarifications that appear over time.

6. Are there more resources to help me understand Fullstory’s GDPR efforts?

See below for more GDPR resources:

Fullstory and GDPR ← YOU ARE HERE. An overview of requirements, definitions, Data Processor, Data Controller, consent, and more.
Fullstory and GDPR — Made to Order ← Product features we've launched on Fullstory to help you manage GDPR.
GDPR FAQs ← If you have a question about Fullstory and GDPR, it's likely answered here!
Fullstory and GDPR [For Your Customers] ← A brief, helpful write-up of the information Fullstory records, what we do with it, and user rights—as might be shared with your users.
Our knowledge base article on GDPR ← regularly updated, covers all the nitty-gritty details.

If you have further questions about GDPR, please reach out and contact us.

Fullstory for data leaders: Behavioral data ready-made for you

Fullstory — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 05:00:00 GMT

Turn Fullstory's high-quality behavioral data sets into immediate value for your audiences.

Fullstory overview: First-party behavioral data at scale

Fullstory — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 05:00:00 GMT

Empower teams with AI-ready data to personalize experiences and boost customer loyalty.

Finding signals through the noise

Fullstory — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 04:00:00 GMT

Essential insights for perfecting your digital experience

In 2011, individuals spent an average of 75 minutes online each day. A decade later, the average time online is forecasted to surge by more than 230%. As more time is spent online across desktop and mobile devices, companies’ digital experiences need to meet the rising expectations of their customers and end users. Many companies turn to analytics tools and platforms to find answers about their user experience and optimize their website or application.

To be truly effective, any platform designed to help you perfect your digital experience should be able to scale with your company’s growth–without burdening you with an overwhelming amount of data.

While there are several tools on the market that automatically collect and index all user interaction data, best-in-class solutions go a step further: they transform this information into pre-configured signals that evolve beyond interaction metrics (i.e. clicks, page visits) to proactively surface trends in user frustration and engagement.

Foundational interaction events and metrics

Interaction events, such as clicks or page visits, are the foundation for more complex signals that surface user frustration and engagement. While interaction events are crucial for analyzing the basics of your digital experience, they only give you surface-level intelligence about how many people are interacting with your website or product. Often, this basic interaction data requires heavy technical intervention and setup to illuminate the context behind each event.

For example, a spike in button clicks in your product might seem noteworthy. However, without digging deeper into the analysis, you might not realize the clicks came from a small set of users in a short time period—the results of frustration with a broken button. To efficiently spot trends and proactively improve your digital experience, patterns in user interactions should be packaged into deeper frustration and engagement signals.

Signals to spot user frustration and friction

We found recently that 77% of consumers are likely to leave without completing a transaction if they encounter an error. At this rate, poor experiences across thousands of interactions can have severe impacts on your revenue. To quickly spot friction points in your digital experience, look for a solution that automatically codifies and surfaces user pain in real time through well-established frustration signals like Rage Clicks.

Frustration signals that surface friction in the user experience include:

Rage Clicks

Rage Clicks are generated by users who repeatedly click on an element in frustration, signaling a misalignment of user expectation and product action. For example, a broken “View My Cart” button could spark users to rapidly and repeatedly click the button with hopes that the page will change. Watching for Rage Click activity can reveal quick wins for improving the user journey.

Error and Dead Clicks

Error Clicks and Dead Clicks are useful signals for finding bugs or other barriers to success in your product. If your DX contains bold, blue text, a user might expect this to link to another page. If clicking the text results in no action or change, this would register as a Dead Click. On the other hand, an Error Click is captured if clicking results in a client-side JavaScript error.

“Over the years, we’ve solved countless UX and customer service issues using Fullstory, and we continue to use it for those purposes every day. Few customers who have a problem on your site actually leave feedback, so if three customers report an issue, that likely represents hundreds who’ve experienced it. Fullstory is crucial to understanding and fixing those issues quickly.”
- Michael Moore, CTO/CIO, Moosejaw

Thrashed Cursor

Cursor thrashing, or rapidly moving the cursor/ mouse around a page, can be an indication of slow site performance or a user’s inability to complete an action in your product. Keeping an eye on the frequency of cursor thrashing across your customer base can help you understand performance and inform UX decisions or customer education plans.

Find out how Yakima Chief Hops was able to proactively identify 30% of defects before customers were impacted by monitoring frustration signals and using Fullstory to recreate user experiences. →

Pinch-to-Zoom

End users often use the pinch-to-zoom gesture when text, images, or other website elements are too small. Surges or trends in customers using pinch-to-zoom are effective in determining ways to improve the user experience through additional visuals or adjustments to page design.

Refreshed

High counts of page refreshes can signal performance problems across a website or product. If an image or video element is broken or missing, page refreshes can indicate that users expected an on-screen change that didn’t appear. When there are problems with page rendering, visitors may refresh the page or application in an attempt to fix the problem.

“Fullstory has changed the way we work. We’ve gotten so much value out of the tool across teams, from our Business Intelligence (BI) team using Data Export to enrich their data models, to being able to quantify the impact of pain points on our site, to smoother communication between customer support and product. It’s been a game-changer and we love it.”
- Matthew LeGare, Senior Director of Digital Product Management, Younique Products

Discover your most engaging content and product areas

While fixing friction is hugely important, another critical piece of the puzzle is exploring how your users are engaging with your content–and to what result.

Investigating and optimizing the content customers are using to complete a task can be highly informative for improving conversions, speeding time to checkout, and increasing overall satisfaction. Engagement signals and insights for perfecting the digital experience include:

Scroll Depth

Are your customers actually reading valuable long-form content? Is there important functionality below the fold of certain product pages? Monitoring how far users scroll down a page can provide insight into the type of content your customers engage with most or even inform decisions around product design and layout.

Highlighted

Monitoring which on-screen elements are highlighted by end users can also provide insight into the ways customers are interacting with content across the digital experience. For example, an ecommerce shop can understand the impact of comparison shopping on their conversion rates by analyzing how frequently customers highlight specific elements, such as product names, to paste and search for lower prices elsewhere.

Element Visibility

Products and websites often have tooltips, banners, alerts, and other content that appears without user interaction or only under certain user conditions (i.e. “Loading” animation is visible). Many times, it’s important to understand how conditional content elements impact user engagement and experience. If a “loading...” text element is visible to most users for several seconds before showing a piece of content, this could signal an opportunity to improve performance and drive better content engagement.

“Fullstory comes up in every voice of customer meeting. We are able to walk people through the actual pain points shoppers are facing and show what we found and how we were able to quickly resolve the issue. Or how we plan to improve the digital experience to add more value for shoppers.”
Yi Cao, Senior Manager, Product Research, Hudson’s Bay Company

As more digital interactions and transactions occur than ever before, collecting data about your application or website is essential to any successful digital strategy. The ability to then synthesize all of that interaction data into insightful signals allows you to make data-driven decisions for a best-in-class digital experience.

Whether you’re just beginning to build your digital strategy or you’re ready for a comprehensive digital experience intelligence solution, Fullstory makes it easy to act on your digital data. Fullstory’s Signals proactively surface quantitative and qualitative insights that are supercharged by session recreation, giving you the full picture of your digital experience.

Learn how Fullstory can help you create a more perfect digital experience.

Performance as a feature: How to evaluate the speed and reliability of your digital experience platform

The Fullstory Team — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 06:00:00 GMT

Before you can embark on a digital experience initiative, you have to start with a foundation of fast, reliable web performance.

You can streamline UX and conversion flows all day, but none of it matters if your site is painfully slow. Customers will bounce or give up based on speed alone.

Because perceived performance is critical to user experience, the last thing you need is a digital experience tool that weighs down your website or your app. That will only exacerbate the very problem you're trying to solve.

Any third-party service you want to use to optimize your digital experience, from A/B testing to analytics, is going to have some impact on the total load time of your page.

The key is setting a “performance budget”—an allowable tolerance of that impact—and ensuring the solutions you select fit within it.

Your goal should be to reap the rewards of third-party platforms without "breaking the bank" or passing along the costs of poor performance to your customers.

Need to free up room in your performance budget? Start with the basics:

Optimize image and media files
Minify JavaScript
Implement caching
Serve content from a CDN
Remove scripts from third parties no longer in use

What to look for in implementation

For most digital experience solutions, the first step is to install a library of code, typically with a bit of JavaScript. This library enables the service to continuously log digital interactions via Session Replay.

Here's what to look for:

Stability and uptime: Does your provider supply an SLA for uptime? Do they alert you proactively if analytics are interrupted?
Client-side processing: Is the script that initiates the service a static script that indexes everything? Or, does it do the heavy lifting, such as event naming or currency conversion, client-side? Does the script increase in size as you want to report new events or metrics?
Perceived performance: Does the script block page rendering? Does it interrupt interactivity with elements on the page?

Digital Experience Intelligence and performance

Fullstory’s Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI) solution is designed for speed and reliability from the ground up.

From one single, tiny recording script (about 58.8 kB, gzipped), customers of Fullstory gain access to 100% complete, instrumentation-free analytics, high-fidelity session replay for every session.

Because Fullstory starts by capturing every digital interaction with the website or web app—with personal data either excluded or masked at the source in the browser or on the device—the size of the Fullstory recording script always stays small.

Your team can build new segments, dashboards, or analytics views in Fullstory without needing to further alter the script code. That means no manual instrumentation.

What does this mean for your business?

Start small, stay small

When it comes to DXI, the script won't "balloon" over time as your team analyzes additional data for future business use cases.

Compare this to other digital experience platforms which require ongoing instrumentation or additions to their recording scripts. With other solutions, every new data point you'd like to analyze requires a manual update behind the scenes. This not only introduces the possibility of human error but increases the size of the file.

In many cases, customers of legacy digital experience tools are unaware of the real size of their script, and that they slowly creep up over time.

Minimize the fetch

Beyond simply being and staying small, Fullstory's recording script is edge-cached on Google’s Cloud CDN. Fullstory monitors and verifies the performance of the script with a third-party synthetic monitoring service that runs constant tests from more than 40 locations around the globe.

In our monitoring, we see that fully loaded times for the file are typically ~20 ms, with some variances depending on global regions. Conservatively, you should expect to see fully loaded times in the range of 50 ms to 150 ms.

Get out of the way

In addition to being small and loading quickly, the Fullstory script also loads asynchronously.

Here's how it works: a small stub script loads the main script (fs.js), but only after other required static resources such as CSS and images load first. This means that Fullstory will never visually block page rendering or interactivity.

Once loaded, the recording script is cached locally in the browser for 10 minutes. It won't load all over again as your visitors navigate from page to page. Every 10 minutes the browser will perform a one-time check to the CDN to look for the latest version. If a new version is available, the browser will download and cache the latest.

While new updates only happen about once per week, any other requests would receive a response code “304 - Not modified” which takes less than 10 ms to complete.

And, because the script loads asynchronously, it's near impossible for the Fullstory script to impact the availability of your website or web app.

On the off-chance that the Fullstory script ever becomes unavailable for any reason, it won't take your site or app down with it. Fullstory loads asynchronously and will never visually block page rendering or interactivity.

Optimize recording

After the initial recording script loads, Fullstory sits quietly in the background while your users interact with your website or web app.

Without processing any complex logic or interfering with the page, it records every mutation in the DOM and bundles those changes in the memory on the browser. During periods of inactivity, the bundled events are compressed and flushed to Fullstory servers—about every 5 seconds or so.

These bundles of events are assembled and sent to Fullstory servers asynchronously to minimize execution on the main thread. Fullstory's bundling processes are never allowed to delay dynamic page rendering or affect the interactivity of any elements on the page.

Understanding performance impact

Verifying perceived performance

When it comes to measuring performance, the most important consideration is the perceived performance or impact on real visitors. For this reason, many web performance leaders have shifted focus from traditional page load times to metrics such as First Contentful Paint (FCP) or First Input Delay (FID).

In order to get a sense of perceived performance, we recommend you use a synthetic web performance monitoring solution, such as Splunk, Catchpoint, or New Relic Synthetics.

With a synthetic solution, you can simulate page loads from multiple geographic locations, report on performance trends over time, and scrub out any outliers. This method will give you the most complete and comprehensive set of data to ensure your digital experience platform’s recording script will fit within your performance budget.

Alternatively, you may choose to use an open-source solution such as Sitespeed.io and create a custom dashboard to watch metrics over time.

Curious to see for yourself?

Contact us to request a tailored performance review of Fullstory’s Digital Experience Intelligence platform. We'll partner with your engineering team to deploy Fullstory in an environment where you can measure how we stack up.

Quick look: Accelerating your digital experience

Fullstory — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 04:00:00 GMT

DX maturity can be measured across 3 key categories: Alignment, Activations, and Technology.

Fullstory's digital experience data engine

Fullstory — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Accelerate your organization’s digital transformation and drive business success with complete DX data.

Extensibility: Integrated systems, optimal results

Fullstory — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Get a complete overview of Data Export, Data Layer Observer, and a growing ecosystem of integrations.

Fullstory for finance and insurance

Fullstory — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Combine traditional product analytics with powerful qualitative insights with DXI.

Guide to Fullstory privacy and security

Fullstory — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Learn about Fullstory privacy and security, including our industry-leading approach to data collection.

Private by Default

Fullstory — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Learn about Fullstory’s industry-leading, privacy-first approach to DXI for web and mobile.

Fullstory for SaaS

Fullstory — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Get a complete picture of the SaaS customer journey with Digital Experience Intelligence.

Responsibility

Fullstory — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Learn about Fullstory's foundations of privacy and security, so you'll never compromise customer trust.

Detections

Fullstory — Wed, 29 Jun 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Detections enables organizations to proactively preserve user privacy with smart PII monitoring.

Fullstory, GDPR, and you

Fullstory — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 07:00:00 GMT

Last updated November 2020

What should you know when a website or native mobile application uses Fullstory?

Meet Fullstory

Thousands of companies use Fullstory every day to see their websites and native mobile applications through their users’ eyes. Fullstory’s session replay and analytics capabilities help web teams troubleshoot bugs, support their customers, and build better experiences. To learn more about Fullstory, visit our home page.

What information is recorded?

A website or app using Fullstory may be recording any of the following information:

Usage patterns:

Clicks
Mouse movements
Scrolling
Typing (except sensitive information*)

Usage patterns illuminate areas of a website or app that are confusing or underused, allowing web designers to improve their customer experience and build better features.

*Passwords, payment information, and Social Security numbers are excluded by default from being recorded. Fullstory does not allow its customers to record these sensitive data under any circumstances according to its Acceptable Use Policy.

Tech specs:

Browser
Device type
Operating system
Resolution
Script errors
IP address**

Bugs and errors are often particular to a specific web browser or device type. This information helps developers build and ship fixes faster.

**Fullstory provides an option to actively discard IP data. Whether to use this feature is up to the discretion of individual data controllers according to their interpretation of the GDPR and its application to their business.

Navigation

Pages visited
Referrers
URL parameters
Session duration

Knowing the most popular pages and sources of referral traffic help product managers and marketers improve the quality of content and advertising.

Personal information

Data controllers may only send this data with consent or legal basis.

Display name
Email address
App-specific data***

Account information helps web teams understand your unique experience and troubleshoot any problems you may be having.

***Websites using Fullstory choose how much, if any, of their own app’s unique customer data to store in Fullstory.

Does Fullstory use this information for its own purposes?

Absolutely not! Fullstory hosts data as part of the service it provides to its customers, but doesn’t make any claim to said data, similar to the way a bank provides safe deposit boxes. Websites using Fullstory have sole ownership of and access to recorded data.

What rights do I have regarding my information?

Under the GDPR, you have strong rights related to the use of your data, including things like...

knowing what information is being recorded and how it will be used
accessing and viewing the information
having your information erased
correcting the information about you
getting a copy of the information for yourself
restricting specific uses or stopping altogether the usage of your information

To invoke these rights, you'll need to contact the website recording the data (“data controller”) and passing it into Fullstory. As mentioned earlier, Fullstory is like a bank offering safe deposit boxes: just as a bank wouldn't access to remove the contents of a customer's safe deposit box, Fullstory wouldn't access or delete data in one of its customers’ accounts which could contain your data.

However, Fullstory provides a suite of tools to help web teams honor the requests of EU citizens under the GDPR, so they should be well-positioned to fulfill your requests.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and Fullstory

Fullstory — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 06:00:00 GMT

Updated November 2020

About the California Consumer Privacy Act and Fullstory

First, a disclaimer: The information we discuss in this article is provided for informational purposes only and is not meant to serve as legal advice. You should work closely with legal and other professional counsel to determine exactly how the CCPA may or may not apply to you and your company. In some places we will cite specific sections of the CCPA for your reference.

In this article: If you’ve landed here, you’ve likely already heard lots about the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). There is already a lot of other great content that explains in detail what the CCPA is. Here, we’ll mostly focus on the CCPA’s impact on your business and how it relates to your use of Fullstory.

1. What is the CCPA?

California Assembly Bill (AB) 375, also known as The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown in June 2018 and went into effect January 1, 2020. Officially, the goal of The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), is “to further Californians’ right to privacy by giving consumers an effective way to control their personal information.” The act outlines five new rights protecting California consumers (See CCPA Sections 1798.100-125):

The right of Californians to know what personal information is being collected about them.
The right of Californians to know whether their personal information is sold or disclosed and to whom.
The right of Californians to say no to the sale of personal information.
The right of Californians to access (or request deletion of) their personal information.
The right of Californians to equal service and price, even if they exercise their privacy rights.

2. Does the CCPA apply to your business?

Since the CCPA was enacted to protect the privacy rights of consumers in California, you may be wondering how this will affect you and your business (especially if you aren’t located in California). When determining how your business might be impacted by the CCPA, there are a few things you might want to consider:

The CCPA applies to companies that “do business” in California and meet ONE or more of these minimum thresholds:
- Has annual gross revenues in excess of 25 million dollars ($25,000,000).
- “Collects” or “Sells” the personal information of 50,000 or more consumers, households or devices.
  - “Collect” - “...buying, renting, gathering, obtaining, receiving, or accessing any ‘personal information’ pertaining to a consumer...actively or passively, or by observing the consumer’s behavior.”
  - “Sell” - “...selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating...a consumer’s personal information...for monetary or other valuable consideration.”
- Derives 50% or more of its annual revenues from selling consumers’ personal information.
The CCPA does not apply when the collection or sale of personal information occurs “wholly outside of California” (See Section 1798.145 (a)(6)).
A covered “business”, as defined by the CCPA, may require its “service provider” to comply with the CCPA if the business shares personal information with the “service provider.” A “service provider” is defined as legal entity that processes information on behalf of a business and to which the business discloses a consumer’s personal information for a business purpose pursuant to a written contract.

What is ‘valuable consideration’?

While “valuable consideration” is not defined in the CCPA, the concept of “consideration” is defined in the California Civil Code (§ 1605) and is a well understood concept of California contract law.

Basically, “valuable consideration” can be taken to mean that if your business exchanges end-user personal information for a business benefit, then you are likely “selling” personal information.

3. What does the CCPA require of your business?

Most of what the CCPA mandates is related to being upfront and transparent with consumers about data collection practices. While best practices around operationalizing the CCPA are subject to change in the short term, there are a few key concepts that are clearly important for you to keep in mind when considering how the CCPA relates to your business’ use of personal information.

Have a clear understanding of what constitutes “personal information.”
Update privacy policies to include descriptions of data collection practices and a summary of consumer’s rights under the CCPA. For businesses that sell or otherwise disclose (see above for a definition of “sell”) personal information for a “business practice”:
- The privacy policy must disclose this fact.
- The privacy policy must also contain a link to an “opt-out” page where a consumer can choose for their personal information to not be sold.
Respond to verified consumer requests for information disclosure or deletion within the appropriate window of time.

What does the CCPA consider “personal information?”

The definition of personal information included within the CCPA is quite expansive. The CCPA states that:

“Personal information” means information that identifies, relates to, describes, is capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household.

The law includes many examples of things that can be considered personal information. These range from where a person lives, geolocation information, social network information, and biometric information. Familiarizing yourself with how the concept of “personal information” applies to your business should be an important consideration.

This only begins to scratch the surface of a very complex topic, but there are more detailed breakdowns of the CCPA’s concept of “personal information” available elsewhere on the web.

Note: As a reminder, the Fullstory Acceptable Use Policy already prohibits transmitting sensitive personal information such as social security numbers, health information, etc., to Fullstory. We have worked hard to provide easy-to-use tools that allow you to ensure these kinds of sensitive information never leave the end-user’s browser.

We will discuss more about how the CCPA’s requirements and the concept of “personal information” relates to Fullstory and session replay below.

4. How does the CCPA affect your business and Fullstory?

It is natural to wonder how the CCPA might affect the relationship your company has with Fullstory—or the relationship we both have with your end-users. The good news is that things haven’t really changed.

If you are a Customer (“business” under the CCPA) using Fullstory, then you can consider Fullstory a “service provider” under the CCPA. As a service provider Fullstory will process personal information for business purposes on your behalf. Fullstory will not sell, retain, use, or disclose any personal information except as necessary to perform our agreed upon business purpose. Pretty much business as usual!

But what about end-users … do I need permission from them to keep using Fullstory?

The CCPA requires companies to disclose their practices of information collection and sale in their privacy policies. Businesses are required to provide consumers an opt-out for the sale of personal information but are not required to offer a similar opt-out for information collection.

Note: Fullstory’s Terms & Conditions require our Customers to have obtained all consents and approvals necessary in order to use the data collected by Fullstory and that they do not and will not violate any law or regulation applicable to them. For more information on this topic please reference this article or see section 11.1 of Fullstory’s Terms & Conditions. And remember, you cannot sell or exchange any information obtained by using Fullstory.

Now, you may run into situations where obtaining more specific, explicit end-user consent makes sense for your digital property. In these cases, the FS.consent API allows you to selectively record parts of your site or app based on explicit end-user consent. For more information regarding use of the FS.consent API in your deployment of Fullstory please check out this knowledge base article.

5. Fullstory data collection and the CCPA

At Fullstory, we want to empower you and your company to create more perfect digital experiences for your customers. In order to accomplish this, Fullstory stores and organizes a lot of data on your behalf. To better understand where Fullstory and the CCPA intersect, you need to know what kinds of information Fullstory collects, what we do with it, and how that information is visible in the platform.

What types of data does Fullstory collect?

Fullstory makes a detailed accounting of every action that takes place on your site or app. From mouse movements and clicks to screen swipes or typing, we store and organize as much as you tell us to! We also store copies of page assets such as images, text, CSS, etc.

It is important that any elements in your digital property that can potentially contain sensitive data are properly excluded from collection.

It is also possible to pass information into Fullstory that was obtained elsewhere. We will discuss this in more detail in a later section.

What does Fullstory do with the data we store on your behalf?

Fullstory allows you to get at both qualitative and quantitative insights from a single set of data. To do this, we use digital experience data to generate charts and graphs, create heatmap visualizations, and render pixel-perfect session replays. In addition, we make all of the raw event data available via data export (JSON format) for you to slice and dice using the data visualization tool of your choice.

Where is personal information visible in the Fullstory platform?

There are basically two places in the Fullstory platform where it would be possible to view collected personal information. These two places are Session Replay and Data Export.

Session Replay: Session replay is the reproduction of a user’s interactions on a website or web application exactly or as close as possible to how the user actually experienced it. In order for any session replay tool to work, session replay vendors (like Fullstory!) must store users’ digital interactions on websites and apps down to the individual clicks, taps, scrolls, mouse movements, etc. By reproducing these interactions, just how they happened, the result is a DVR-like reproduction of those experiences, just how they happened (Learn how session replay works in our definitive guide).
Replay is useful for all sorts of reasons—e.g. to support customers, debug errors, optimize pages, and more—and offers a totally different level of insight than traditional analytics alone.
Data Export: Fullstory’s Data Export provides a periodic, raw data extract of events that have been recorded for your organization and an API endpoint to retrieve the data extracts. This data set can be used on its own or to supplement existing models that aim to analyze user interactions on a website or app.

Although personal information can be visible in both session replay and data export, data export only contains a subset of the information potentially visible in session replay. This is because data export contains only information related to events, like text or elements a user clicked.

Session replay, on the other hand, contains the event information as well as the images and other text that make up the site or app itself. Because session replay has the most surface area we recommend you optimize exclusions with session replay in mind. Doing so should result in a clean data export as well.

Fullstory and personal information

How do Fullstory and the collection of personal information intersect? Just because something is considered personal information, doesn’t mean you cannot collect it or pass that information to Fullstory. There are valid business reasons why a company would know a person’s name or email address, for example, and why having that information in Fullstory might make sense.

Your business must determine what kinds of personal information to collect for valid business purposes. Based on these determinations, your business must inform consumers appropriately through your privacy policy and/or terms of service.

Now, there are two main ways personal information can make its way into Fullstory:

The first way personal information can make its way into Fullstory is through the collection of non-excluded text content in a website or app. This text may be either part of the site, or something typed into a field by an end-user. Either way, this collected text would be visible in a session replay. It is up to you, the Fullstory customer, to ensure any page elements or fields that contain sensitive personal information are properly excluded. We have provided the tools necessary for you to accomplish this and you can read more about that process here.
The second way that personal information can end up in Fullstory is that you can actively send user data like name, email address, company, etc. to Fullstory using one of our APIs (FS.identify or FS.setUserVars) or one of our many integrations. For more information, including best practices, on passing additional end-user data into Fullstory check out our help articles on FS.identify and FS.setUserVars.

Now that you understand how personal information flows into Fullstory, it is important for you to verify that sensitive information is being properly excluded from collection and that the information you are using is appropriate and necessary for improving the digital experience of your end-users.

But what about IP addresses... are they personal information?

This is a great question because people have a whole range of differing intuitions when it comes to IP address. Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple yes or no on this one.

Whether or not an IP address will be considered personal information may depend on what other information you have in addition to the IP address itself. Work with your legal counsel to determine how you wish to treat IP addresses in the case of your business. If you determine IP addresses are personal information in the context of your business, it doesn’t mean you can’t still use them, but it likely means that if updating your privacy policy for CCPA compliance, you will want to keep this decision in mind.

If for some reason you decide to ditch IP addresses all together, then Fullstory is here to help make that easy for you. Fullstory allows you to discard all end-user IP addresses via your in app settings. Learn how to do this here.

6. Honoring end-user personal information requests

As previously mentioned, the CCPA grants consumers the right to request that a business discloses information collected about them or to delete said information. While you will be the one working directly with your end-users to honor their requests, Fullstory wants to be sure you have all the tools at your disposal to make this as frictionless as possible.

Let’s dive into some specifics around how Fullstory empowers you to comply with information requests and process user deletions.

Deletion requests

Fullstory users with admin privileges can entirely erase end-users from their account at the click of a button. (Okay, two buttons.) The “Delete User” button is located at the bottom of a User Card in Fullstory. The whole user deletion process looks like this:

After a user is completely deleted, a discreet email is sent acting as a receipt to confirm that the appropriate action has been taken. In addition to this deletion via the Fullstory UI, we also offer an API endpoint for deleting users.

Personal information access requests

California based end-users may submit personal information requests of your company at any time. It is likely that personal information about your end-users may be spread across multiple systems, but finding any personal information you may have passed into Fullstory should be quite straightforward.

Using Fullstory’s OmniSearch you can quickly narrow in on any information you may currently be storing related to an individual consumer or household. Using this information, you can have an informed conversation with your end-user about their data and even provide them a copy if needed.

Like with the “Delete User” functionality that we discussed above, the buttons allowing you to “Download user events” and “Download user pages” are available at the bottom of the User Card in Fullstory. The User Event download contains all the recorded event data for a particular user that is searchable/viewable in Fullstory. The User Pages download file contains a series of all the pages that the end-user has visited on your site/app.

Learn more about downloading end-user data files.

Note: Fullstory will not deal directly with end-users regarding personal information requests (or user deletions). Because the data held in Fullstory belongs to you/them, we will direct them to you in order to discuss these matters.

7. Does Fullstory offer a Data Processing Agreement (DPA)?

Yes. You can view and sign our DPA online or send your version to privacy@fullstory.com.pgm.c5nprx.cc for review.

8. How will I know if I'm compliant with the CCPA?

There is currently no means by which a company can be “certified” as compliant with the CCPA. We recommend that you consult your legal advisors to determine what actions you should take in order to become and remain compliant with the CCPA.

As the CCPA has yet to come into effect, it is important to stay up to date with any last minute changes made to the act before that date. The California Attorney General’s office posts resources related to the CCPA here and has a CCPA newsletter you can subscribe to for updates here.

Another helpful resource is the CCPA amendment tracker maintained by the International Association of Privacy Professionals.

Consumer survey: The industries that are nailing digital experiences (and which have room to grow)

The Fullstory Team — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 06:00:00 GMT

How 7,000 global consumers rate their digital experiences with 5 key industries

Setting the scene: Consumers want speed and simplicity

1. Retail is ahead of the DX curve

2. The world needs more “simple” digital experiences

3. Consumers are cutting spending in nearly all areas

Summer feature releases enable faster, deeper customer connections

Fullstory — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 04:00:00 GMT

See friction and fix it–fast–with these new features from Fullstory.

Fullstory overview: Action-ready DX insights for every team

Fullstory — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 04:00:00 GMT

The answers you need to build the perfect digital experience.

Journeys

Fullstory — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Transform data into insightful journey maps that reveal opportunities to perfect the user experience.

2027 Digital Experience Playbook

Fullstory — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:00:00 GMT

The breakage-frustration split: industries diverging on how errors translate to user frustration
Engagement: more time spent doesn't always mean deeper engagement
The device gap: mobile experiences improving unevenly across industries
A new kind of noise: AI agents are showing up in the data across every industry

This is just a glimpse of what the full data reveals.

Experience the complete Digital Benchmark Report 2026 and compare your own data.

2027 Digital Experience Playbook for Gaming

Fullstory — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:00:00 GMT

The pile-up: rage, dead, and error clicks moving together
Engagement: more time in play, not more engagement
The device gap: mobile errors and dead clicks diverging
A new kind of noise: detection's blind spot

This is just a glimpse of what the full data reveals.

Experience the complete Digital Benchmark Report 2026 and compare your own data.

2027 Digital Experience Playbook for Food & Beverage

Fullstory — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:00:00 GMT

Hungry customers don't have much patience for digital friction. Here's what this year's data reveals about ordering and guest experience, and what it means for how you plan for 2027.

The decoupling: breakage and frustration both easing
Engagement: shorter sessions, same depth
The device gap: mobile stable, ordering isn't
A new kind of noise: reading unusual signals correctly

This is just a glimpse of what the full data reveals.

Experience the complete Digital Benchmark Report 2026 and compare your own data.

2027 Digital Experience Playbook for Travel & Hospitality

Fullstory — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:00:00 GMT

Travelers expect digital experiences to keep pace with their plans. Here's what this year's data reveals about the booking experience, and what it means for how you plan for 2027.

The decoupling: breakage down, frustration flat
Engagement: longer journeys, same progress
The device gap: mobile friction easing
A new kind of noise: booking agents vs. bot traffic

This is just a glimpse of what the full data reveals.

Experience the complete Digital Benchmark Report 2026 and compare your own data.

2027 Digital Experience Playbook for Software

Fullstory — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:00:00 GMT

The role software plays is changing, along with how people use it. Here's what this year's data reveals about product experience, and what it means for how you plan for 2027.

The pile-up: breakage, frustration, and the one signal that improved
Engagement: shorter sessions, shallower use
The device gap: mobile friction eased on both fronts
A new kind of noise: agents becoming users

This is just a glimpse of what the full data reveals.

Experience the complete Digital Benchmark Report 2026 and compare your own data.

2027 Digital Experience Playbook for Financial Services

Fullstory — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:00:00 GMT

The inversion: breakage up, frustration down
Engagement: more time without more trust
The device gap: stability vs. expectations
A new kind of noise: telling bots from legitimate agents

This is just a glimpse of what the full data reveals.

Experience the complete Digital Benchmark Report 2026 and compare your own data.

Fullstory for Customer Agents

Fullstory — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:00:00 GMT

Session summaries and behavioral context, delivered into your support platform, so agents stop guessing.

Workforce: Boost productivity with optimized tools and workflows

Fullstory — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Fullstory Workforce reveals workflow issues & unused tools to cut costs and boost employee productivity.

What great analytics looks like when AI meets real behavior

Fullstory — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 06:00:00 GMT

This session was recorded live during Virtual Innovation Day.

See what StoryAI can do.

Fullstory overview video

Fullstory — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 19:00:00 GMT

Leading product teams use Fullstory, the intelligent digital experience platform that tells you everything you need to know about how people interact with your digital experience.

Level up your digital experience with Fullstory: Get a demo today.

Guides and Surveys: Where insight and action unite

Fullstory — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:00:00 GMT

See how Fullstory’s Guides and Surveys turns behavioral insights into real-time, contextual engagement.

StoryAI: Your always-on team of agent analysts

Fullstory — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 05:00:00 GMT

StoryAI is Fullstory’s intelligence layer that turns behavioral data into clear, actionable insights.

Advanced plan: Elevate your analytics

Fullstory — Wed, 15 May 2024 05:00:00 GMT

For brands looking to boost growth and enhance market responsiveness with data-driven decision-making.

Business plan: Understand user behavior

Fullstory — Wed, 15 May 2024 05:00:00 GMT

For teams that need total cross-functional clarity into their digital portfolio.

Anywhere: Activation: Turning moments into momentum

Fullstory — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Anywhere: Activation turns live behavioral signals into real-time change for personalized experiences.

Anywhere: Warehouse: Clean, ready-to-use behavioral data

Fullstory — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Anywhere: Warehouse provides clean, structured behavioral data into your warehouse for faster insights.

The complete guide to fixing customer frustration online

Fullstory — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 06:00:00 GMT

Why frustrating digital experiences matter (and how Fullstory's behavioral data platform can help)

Almost two-thirds (64%) of global consumers say they’re likely to leave a site or app without completing a transaction if they encounter a problem or frustration, according to a Fullstory survey.

Making this even more alarming, less than one in five (19%) digital professionals say they understand where and why customers become frustrated on their site or app.

This means that enterprises around the world are leaving money on the table when it comes to frustration-driven site abandonment.

While these stats speak for themselves, you're probably asking questions like:

What are the main drivers of frustration online?
What are the identifiable signs of struggle?
What's the future of frustration detection online?
How do you use Fullstory's frustration signals to search for broken experiences on your website or app?

All of these questions (and more!) are answered in our guide to finding and fixing customer frustration online.

1. The state of customer frustration online

Why do you get frustrated online?

According to Fullstory’s 2023 consumer survey, 77% of global consumers say that their top priority when shopping online is “to quickly accomplish what I came to do.”

Plus, your competition is just a click, tap, or search away. That's why understanding, identifying, and eliminating the causes of user frustration is critical for success online.

The 7 biggest causes of online user frustration

Now that we've identified the root of user frustration online, let’s look at some examples of the most common culprits of poor digital experiences.

1. Clunky, dysfunctional, dated, or just bad site or app elements and design

Every element showcased on your website or app has the potential to delight, help, confuse, or frustrate customers. The possibilities for what you can feature on your platform are virtually endless.

Listed below are just a few ways to frustrate customers with the design, UI/UX, or “stuff” you put on your site or app:

Eye-catching, look-at-me elements. These can create unnecessary distractions.
Auto-play videos or music. No one likes a panicked search for the mute or pause button.
Hiding or omitting functional navigation elements. E.g. "Where is [Search | Login | Support | Contact | some other basic thing]?"
Too-clever navigation. I.e., using unconventional words for common navigation elements.
Text/images/elements that are too big or small.
Confusing icons. I.e. icons that don't convey what they represent.
Graphics for text.
Absent calls to action. What is the "Okay, now what ..." for your users?

2. Performance

The takeaway from this data is clear: If your site doesn’t load in a timely manner, nothing else really matters—because shoppers will leave before they see it.

3. Aggressive tactics

Pop-ups, pop-unders, lightbox overlays, etc. How fast can you find and click the “X?” Perhaps the most egregious offender that still gets a lot of playtime is the CTA to "sign-up for our newsletter" lightbox overlay—triggered on the first visit to a site after a handful of seconds.
Ads! In particular, the ones that take over the entire screen with auto-play sound and no option to exit. While advertisements may be a required revenue stream (and in-your-face ads are more likely to be seen, clicked, and valued), there's a tenuous balance. The rise in ad-blocking software is a solid indicator that many advertisers and publishers are taking ads too far. Additionally, advertisements with clickbait thumbnails or titles can create cognitive load for your users, who must tease out if the "article" is real or an ad. Associating your brand with clickbait is likely something you want to avoid.
Opt-in boxes, automatically checked. Automatically being opted-in to marketing materials may increase sign-ups, but it can also infuriate your users. Tread lightly.
Which one/where's the download button? While this should go without saying, attempting to trick users into clicking the wrong button sows distrust, at best. If ad placements on your site sit near critical buttons, consider how those advertisements may be used against your users.

There are other questionable tactics that can drive users up the wall. For a comprehensive overview of practices to avoid, refer to this list of "dark patterns."

4. It's broken

If your website or application isn't working, it's highly likely your users are going to notice. Granted, the site or application may not be working for lots of reasons. Here are just a couple:

User error. Sometimes customers can’t seem to figure out how to use your site or app. And that’s your fault, like it or not.
Bugs. Some part of the site is broken. Perhaps it’s a bug. Perhaps something else.
Dead links. No one likes a button that leads nowhere.

5. It's taking too long to do [x]

If users feel like the process to reach a certain page on your site (or point of conversion) takes too long or requires too many steps, they will quickly become frustrated.

6. I’m confused and/or I have no idea what I’m doing

Most users will just leave, with only a select few making it over to help documentation, and only 43% will leave feedback if they encounter an issue.

7. My device is broken and/or my internet connection stinks, etc.

We've all been there—a slow (or missing) internet connection, a lagging, uncooperative device.

The kicker about this one is that it doesn't even have to be your site or app's fault for you to take the blame. What can you even do about this one?

There are only imperfect solutions, if any, for this one. You may need to get creative.

Frustration detection—indirect vs. direct

Today, online businesses rely on two broad means of gauging customer sentiment, whether positive or negative (frustration or engagement). These two methods can be categorized as direct or indirect.

Direct methods to measure user frustration on the web

There are three major problems with direct methods of frustration measurement:

1. They require the customer to do the hard work

2. They assume a customer can articulate their frustration

Have you ever been in a bad mood but you weren’t exactly sure why? Online experiences don't have to be in-your-face frustrating to be dissatisfying.

3. They can bias results

Indirect methods to measure user frustration on the web

Giving a voice to unspoken frustration

At Fullstory, we assume the customer’s default reaction to having a bad experience online is—at best—to say nothing. At worst, they report their bad experience, but not to you—to others.

For most, bad experiences are never shared anywhere, and the result is a gap between the real and the reported online experience.

Fullstory is helping teams bridge that gap through session replay and search technology. The Frustration Guide serves to help you understand these tools so that you can reduce user struggle online.

The future of frustration detection is indirect

While indirect methods for measuring customer frustration online have been historically limited, advances in technology have created new ways to measure and understand the online customer experience.

That's where session replay comes in.

2. Frustration signals captured in session replay

Fullstory indexes five primary customer frustration signals: rage clicks, dead clicks, error clicks, form abandonment, and thrashed cursor.

What are rage clicks?

Rage clicks occur when users rapidly click (or tap) on your site or app. Rage clicking is the digital equivalent of cursing to release frustration.

As a frustration event, rage clicks were first introduced by Fullstory in 2015 and have become an important way to identify frustrating sessions on websites and apps.

Critically, it's not easy to predict what might cause a rage click, which is why searching your user sessions in Fullstory for rage click events is so useful—you'll make unexpected discoveries.

Rage clicks captured in session replay

How Fullstory users put rage clicks to work

How are Fullstory users making use of rage clicks?

SpanishDict found users rage clicking on verb conjugations. Having made the discovery, they investigated further and began allowing clicks to create pronunciations and specific meanings. (Read more).
TravelPerk searches sessions for rage clicks, observes what part of their app is creating frustration, and then runs a broader search in Fullstory to research sessions that include interaction with the offending element. (Read more).
Appcues saw new users rage click simply because of a server-side delay that, when paired with confusing copy, resulted in users rapidly re-clicking a submit button:

More rage click resources

We've written extensively about rage clicks and if rapid-fire clicks are a focus for your research, you should take a read through these additional resources:

Rage Click Examples and Actions Examples of what can drive Rage Clicks as well as a case study from a Fullstory customer.
From Rage Clicks to Product Improvements. How to use Rage Clicks and the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework to reveal potential desire paths in your product.
Rage Clicks, the Basics. Our knowledge base article on Rage, Error, and Dead Clicks.
List Your Top Rage Clicks.

What are dead clicks?

Dead clicks are useful for teasing out these nuanced behaviors. Investigating them in Fullstory can result in discovering opportunities to help users.

More examples of what dead clicks can reveal

What are error clicks?

What is thrashed cursor?

More examples of what thrashed cursors can reveal

What is form abandonment?

Filling out forms on any website or app can be time-consuming, friction-filled, and often downright frustrating. But it doesn’t have to be.

3. Most frustrated sessions

What is a frustrated session?

Replay any session replays from the Most Frustrated Sessions list and you'll jump right to the moments identified as frustrating.

4. Turning frustration into better products

Reducing frustrating experiences online starts with awareness and ends with deploying the tools necessary to find, understand, and resolve frustration through product improvements.

Let's reduce user struggle—and grow your revenue—together.

Start solving frustration on the web. Get a demo and see Fullstory in action.

How to choose the right digital experience platform for your business

Fullstory — Fri, 01 May 2020 04:00:00 GMT

11 questions you should ask when evaluating a digital experience platform

Building a digital experience (DX) that customers love is no easy task—the right platform can help.

According to PWC, one in three people walk away from a business they love after just one bad experience.

But how do you select the right platform for your business? You start by defining your biggest digital experience challenges.

According to Gartner, by 2024, 80% of IT organizations will undergo radical restructuring and changes to their missions as they embrace product-centric operating models. How can you stay ahead?

What problems are you trying to solve with a digital experience platform?

The most common challenges we hear from customers and prospects can be traced back to two primary causes:

A lack of visibility into the customer’s digital experience (aka The Problem of the Unknown), and
An inability to move quickly due to internal barriers (aka The Problem of Time-to-Value)

The problem of the unknown might sound like...

“We don’t have enough visibility into where and why our users are experiencing friction and getting frustrated.”
“We don’t know how user frustration is impacting conversions and overall customer happiness.”
“We are receiving complaints about poor experience from customers via support or social media, but struggle to replicate the issues.”
“We aren’t sure how changes to our website or app are impacting key funnel metrics.”
“We feel like we’re missing opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell, but we aren’t sure where they are.”
“We hear that our site or app is difficult to use, but struggle to prioritize the most impactful UX adjustments.”

The Problem of Time-to-Value might sound like...

“Our organization is siloed and we struggle to communicate and make improvements quickly.”
“Different teams look at different sources of data, which makes it difficult to all get on the same page.”
“We struggle to create consensus across leadership around where to invest resources to improve the digital experience.”
“It’s difficult for our engineers to prioritize between fixing bugs and developing new feature functionality.”
“Once we ship an experience, we move on. We don’t have a way to quickly iterate and improve.”
“Our competitors are setting the standard for digital experience and we are worried we aren’t keeping up.”

If at any point while reading this guide you have questions, don't hesitate to reach out to our team.

Solving the problem of the unknown

If your most pressing problems revolve around what you don’t know about your digital experience, you’ll want to select a digital experience platform that can help you eliminate blind spots.

Does this platform provide a complete record of digital experience data?

Some of these platforms utilize one simple JavaScript snippet to index every user interaction on your site or app from day one—ensuring you don’t miss a single datapoint.

Does this platform provide quantitative data (what is happening) and qualitative data (why is it happening)?

Your platform should provide both quantitative data and qualitative data so that you can quickly understand and prioritize improvements.

Does this platform proactively find and surface user frustration insights?

Does this platform support mobile apps?

Solving the Problem of Time-to-Value

Is this platform easy to implement and maintain?

Is this platform accessible and usable for both technical and non-technical teams?

The ability to pivot and act quickly is often a result of individual teams having access to the information they need when they need it.

Does this platform surface insights that are relevant at every level in the organization?

How will this platform enrich my existing technology stack?

You should consider whether the platform you’re evaluating has:

Robust APIs that empower developers to enrich their tech stack with platform data and deepen the insights they receive within the platform itself.
Webhooks to power workflows across the business and allow you to set up automations and take action in real time.
An ecosystem of integrations that allows you to connect your tech stack and create a shared language around digital experience across your business.

A well-integrated platform will amplify your entire tech stack with digital experience data, providing a common language for disparate teams.

How will this platform enable efficient iteration and optimization?

"Building an optimal digital experience isn’t a one-and-done. You have to iterate continuously to meet ever-changing customer needs, which is why experimentation is critical to your business. You no longer have to guess what your customer wants, and your digital experience platform should surface powerful insights into how users interact with your website or app. It should also easily integrate with your experimentation platform to fuel smarter experiments that drive stronger results to delight customers." — Glenn Griffin, VP Global Partnerships and Channels at Optimizely

Two final key considerations: Platform performance and responsibility

How will this platform impact the perceived performance of my site or app?

Ask your vendors to walk you through how their platform is instrumented and how that instrumentation impacts the perceived performance of your site or app for end-users.

How does the platform vendor view responsibility—including end-user privacy, data security, and compliance?

As you evaluate digital experience platforms, look closely at their policies on end-user privacy, security, and compliance with legislation such as CCPA and GDPR.

Choosing the right digital experience analytics platform for your business

About Fullstory

Fullstory provides a new way to understand and improve your digital experience.

Workforce: Privacy and security

Fullstory — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Improve workforce productivity while ensuring data privacy and compliance.

Anywhere: Activate behavioral data at scale

Fullstory — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Fullstory Anywhere activates behavioral data across your stack to drive personalization and performance.

Fullstory portfolio: Behavioral data in action

Fullstory — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Unlock first-party behavioral data to improve digital experiences and drive customer loyalty.

Debugging with full context using Sentry + Fullstory

Fullstory — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 05:00:00 GMT

Spend less time debugging and more time coding.

Watch as engineers from Fullstory and Sentry demonstrate, in real time, how to get to the bottom of a customer experience issue quickly and efficiently using the Fullstory & Sentry integration.

What's Covered

Topics discussed in this webinar include:

A technical overview of how to connect Sentry + Fullstory to ensure every error is paired with a Fullstory session link and Sentry errors are searchable in Fullstory.
An over-the-shoulder look as Steve and Patrick debug two real life errors using Fullstory + Sentry together.
How Sentry + Fullstory make it easy to understand what led a user to a specific error state, whether the error impacted the user’s experience, how many users are being impacted by the error, and of course, how to fix the error.

Fullstory's Session Replay

Fullstory — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 04:00:00 GMT

One click session summaries take session insights to the next level. Save time with AI generated context surrounding a specific user’s behavior so you can move towards action more efficiently.

Travel and hospitality: Digital experience statistics to know

Fullstory — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 04:00:00 GMT

Based on data from two consumer surveys, here are the trends travel and hospitality companies need to know to succeed in this new era of travel.

How often travelers book lodging, transportation, and activities before a trip

How people rate their digital experiences with the travel industry

Travel sites need to nail the basics

Many travel companies have room for improvement

Putting a price tag on perfection

Spark 2022: The first DXI conference

Fullstory — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 05:00:00 GMT

A look back at some of the highlights from Spark 2022 in Atlanta.

The good and bad of product friction

Fullstory — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 05:00:00 GMT

I would say that there are absolutely times where friction is a terrible thing and there's no way to spin it in a positive way, but I would say plenty of times friction really helps slow the user down in a way that's really valuable and meaningful to them. —Agata Bugaj, Senior Product Manager at Fullstory

Agata and Melanie discussed topics including:

How to identify product friction.
How to solve for different types of friction.
When and why friction is not always bad.

You can keep up with our LinkedIn content by following us there or on Twitter.

Watch the Replay

Read the Transcript

Melanie Crissey: Only seven months.

Agata Bugaj: I know, it's crazy.

Melanie Crissey: I feel like it's been so long.

Melanie Crissey: So it falls in the first bucket.

Agata Bugaj: Yeah.

Melanie Crissey: Because it's just not working as designed even though it's there.

Melanie Crissey: We're really attached to the suitcase.

Agata Bugaj: Yeah, let's say that I am suitcase.com.

Melanie Crissey: Yes.

Agata Bugaj: Terrible example.

Melanie Crissey: Free startup idea.

Melanie Crissey: Rage Clicking, yeah.

Melanie Crissey: We both do.

Melanie Crissey: That's not the goal.

Agata Bugaj: 100 percent.

Melanie Crissey: Because sometimes you just need to prove to yourself that it's right. Maybe you run an experiment?

Agata Bugaj: No, for sure. And I think sometimes it also comes down to well, what if you invest in this thing and it's the wrong thing to invest in, right?

Melanie Crissey: Right.

Agata Bugaj: Exactly.

Melanie Crissey: Check out Fullstory.com/jobs and-

Speaker 3: We do have any audience question.

Agata Bugaj: Yeah, no. I think you hit the nail on the head. I mean that's definitely a great way to find areas of friction. That's absolutely where you start-

Agata Bugaj: Yeah. And you could always just watch customers, to sit next to them and see what they're doing and ask questions.

Melanie Crissey: Do a little traditional research.

Agata Bugaj: Yeah, but if you want to do the set, you know, two in the morning, that's not an option.

Melanie Crissey: You build your prototype.

Agata Bugaj: Yes.

Melanie Crissey: In Axure or InDesign or whatever it is that you-

Agata Bugaj: Invision, Figma.

Melanie Crissey: Invision. That's what I'm thinking. InDesign is something else. Figma, yeah. Whatever those are. Or draw it on a piece of paper.

Agata Bugaj: Yeah, paper prototype, and that's a thing.

Melanie Crissey: Yeah, challenge us.

Agata Bugaj: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Melanie Crissey: Okay. Great. Then yeah, I think that's it. Leave your comments, follow us on LinkedIn, stay in touch with Fullstory. We've got content like this shipping out all the time.

Agata Bugaj: Yep. Thanks, Melanie.

Melanie Crissey: Let's get back to it ... thank you. Thanks.

Fullstory for Mobile Apps

Fullstory — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Fullstory gives you the insights you need to create an app worth downloading. Watch to find out how.

The power of cross-functional collaboration

Hunter Garrett — Tue, 04 Jun 2019 05:00:00 GMT

“As a product manager we can get too focused on the building of features and not enough focus on establishing relationships across the company.” — Justin Dilley, Head of Product at Fullstory

Justin and Hanna focused on cross-functional collaboration, and covering topics including:

What cross-functional collaboration looks like at Fullstory.
The challenges of cross-functional collaboration—including remote work.
How to balance building strong cross-functional relationships with a high-performance company culture.

Tune in!

Watch the Replay

Read the Transcript

Justin Dilley: Yeah, super excited to be here and chatting with you guys in this LinkedIn Live situation, and chatting with you about all things product management, Hanna.

Justin Dilley: I've been at Fullstory just a little over a year. I joined in March of last year as product manager number one.

Hanna Woodburn: That's awesome. Yeah, I remember you interviewed me, it was your second or third week. So what did you do before you came to Fullstory?

Hanna Woodburn: Awesome. So this conversation is about cross-functional collaboration.

Justin Dilley: Great topic.

Hanna Woodburn: So who are you working with cross-functionally at Fullstory?

Hanna Woodburn: I feel like there's a trend that we're seeing here of, great communication is critical.

Hanna Woodburn: So you've hinted at our structure here, which is certainly unique. Why don't you talk a little bit about how you think that helps foster cross-functional collaborative?

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah, definitely. How do you see cross-functional collaboration evolving at Fullstory? Do you have a sense of what it looks like in the future?

Hanna Woodburn: Yeah, for sure. So we've talked a lot about why a cross-functional collaboration is good for us internally. Do you think that helps us build better products?

Hanna Woodburn: One last comment, Angela from Curtis says, Justin, I love your product. What are your thoughts on good process versus bad process as your company grows?

Hanna Woodburn: Great. Well, thank you so much for sharing your time and insights with us today.

Justin Dilley: Thanks for chatting.

Justin Dilley: Thanks guys.

Measuring your mobile experience

Fullstory — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 05:00:00 GMT

Are your mobile analytics giving you the full story about your customer’s app experience? Are you measuring the things that matter most to your mobile users?

In this webinar, Kyle Henderson, Principal Product Manager at Fullstory, takes you through the must-have metrics for understanding engagement and conversion in your mobile application.

Watch Webinar

What's Covered

Topics discussed in this webinar include:

Why what you measure matters and how choosing the wrong metrics can lead to costly mistakes down the road.
The most important metrics for understanding user engagement and conversion.
How the best metrics help you build a business case for continued investment in mobile experience optimization.

How to build an empathy-based, data-backed customer journey map

Fullstory — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 05:00:00 GMT

Watch Webinar

What's Covered

Topics discussed in this webinar include:

An easy, repeatable way to map your customer journey and identify the top opportunities for improvement.
How to ensure your customer journey map is a living, breathing guide to taking action and making improvements, not a static artifact that gets forgotten as a one-time exercise.
The essential practice of validating your customer journey insights with customer data and prioritizing the top opportunities for improvement based on potential impact.

5 habits of successful product-led companies

Fullstory — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 05:00:00 GMT

Join us as leaders from Fullstory and Pendo share their thoughts on the 5 Key Habits of Successful Product-Led Companies.

Watch Webinar

What's Covered

Topics discussed in this webinar include:

How a simple bi-weekly meeting can help drive real change in your digital experience.
One easy way to turn customer feedback into data-driven evidence for change.
Which data points to track and share to motivate every team to improve the customer experience.

How to build better products by focusing on the why

Fullstory — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 05:00:00 GMT

Are you solving the right problem for your users?

In this webinar, you'll learn:

To think differently about defining the problem your product is trying to solve.
One simple statement can bring clarity to your product management process.
To use the 9 Blocker to prioritize feature work and drives alignment across your organization.

Watch the webinar:

Fullstory's product roadmap and beyond

Fullstory — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 05:00:00 GMT

Fullstory's product roadmap and beyond

Featured Speakers:

Agata Bugaj, Senior Vice President, Product at Fullstory

Fullstory portfolio: Enhance decision-making with behavioral data

Fullstory — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 05:00:00 GMT

Integrate AI-ready data to refine user profiles, boost personalization, and streamline experiences.

Enterprise plan: Transform your data strategy

Fullstory — Wed, 15 May 2024 05:00:00 GMT

Designed for large brands, this plan offers top-tier data capture, access controls, & premium analytics.

Data Direct: The next chapter in personalization

Fullstory — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 05:00:00 GMT

This offering gives you a full view of behavioral data to leverage user sentiment in real-time.

GDPR and Fullstory

Fullstory — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 07:00:00 GMT

About the General Data Protection Regulation and Fullstory

Last updated May 2021

1. What is the GDPR?

The GDPR seems to represent a real sea change, giving people strong agency in how their personal data is collected and used. Unlike the Directive from the mid-90s, the GDPR:

is much more specific about what is okay and not okay,
introduces a broader definition of personal data,
sets forth such stringent requirements that companies are required to make real operational changes,
is completely uniform across the EU, leaving a lot less wiggle room for interpretation, and
enforces penalties that are really, really steep; it’s clear that the EU wants to ensure real change.

2. What does the GDPR require?

A bunch of stuff, but because it’s new, it can be hard to say exactly how the GDPR requirements map onto specific operational changes. Some of the key concepts are:

Being really clear about what constitutes personal data.
Being really clear about ensuring that personal data is used only with a user’s explicit consent or some other lawful basis for processing it.
Keeping data secure.
Giving EU citizens a set of rights with respect to their personal data, including things like:
the right to see what data a company has collected about them,
the right to control how that data is shared with other companies,
the right to have all of their data deleted.

Let's take a closer look at how these GDPR requirements can be applied to Fullstory and session replay.

What is considered “personal data?”

Before we go further, just what is recorded by Fullstory and why? The power of Fullstory is linked to "session replay" (a.k.a. session playback).

What is session replay?

In order for any session replay tool to work, session replay vendors must log user behaviors on websites and apps down to clicks, taps, scrolls, mouse movements, and more.

How might you capture personal data With Fullstory session replay?

As a Fullstory customer, how should I think about Fullstory with respect to the GDPR?

When you use Fullstory on your site, you are sending data about your users (which may or may not be personal data) into your Fullstory account, which is like your very own safe deposit box.

Do I need to obtain consent before recording sessions with Fullstory?

But what about IP Address?

3. How will Fullstory empower me to honor my users' requests around their own personal data?

Let’s dive into some specific rights introduced via the GDPR and how Fullstory will help you honor those rights.

Right to be forgotten

Fullstory users with admin privileges can entirely erase users from their account at the click of a button after confirmation.

After a user is completely deleted, a discreet email is sent acting as a receipt to confirm that the appropriate action has been taken. We also offer an API endpoint for deleting users.

Right to object

Right of access

Data portability

Please read "GDPR Made to Order" to learn about how the Fullstory app works to accommodate GDPR.

4. Does Fullstory offer a Data Processing Agreement (DPA)?

Yes. You can view and sign our DPA online: Fullstory Data Processing Agreement.

Once you follow that link, you'll need to authenticate your access using an emailed verification code. You will have the chance to read the document prior to signing.

5. How will I know if I’m compliant with the GDPR?

6. Are there more resources to help me understand Fullstory’s GDPR efforts?

See below for more GDPR resources:

Fullstory and GDPR ← YOU ARE HERE. An overview of requirements, definitions, Data Processor, Data Controller, consent, and more.
Fullstory and GDPR — Made to Order ← Product features we've launched on Fullstory to help you manage GDPR.
GDPR FAQs ← If you have a question about Fullstory and GDPR, it's likely answered here!
Fullstory and GDPR [For Your Customers] ← A brief, helpful write-up of the information Fullstory records, what we do with it, and user rights—as might be shared with your users.
Our knowledge base article on GDPR ← regularly updated, covers all the nitty-gritty details.

If you have further questions about GDPR, please reach out and contact us.

Fullstory for data leaders: Behavioral data ready-made for you

Fullstory — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 05:00:00 GMT

Turn Fullstory's high-quality behavioral data sets into immediate value for your audiences.

Fullstory overview: First-party behavioral data at scale

Fullstory — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 05:00:00 GMT

Empower teams with AI-ready data to personalize experiences and boost customer loyalty.

Finding signals through the noise

Fullstory — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 04:00:00 GMT

Essential insights for perfecting your digital experience

Foundational interaction events and metrics

Signals to spot user frustration and friction

Frustration signals that surface friction in the user experience include:

Rage Clicks

Error and Dead Clicks

“Over the years, we’ve solved countless UX and customer service issues using Fullstory, and we continue to use it for those purposes every day. Few customers who have a problem on your site actually leave feedback, so if three customers report an issue, that likely represents hundreds who’ve experienced it. Fullstory is crucial to understanding and fixing those issues quickly.”
- Michael Moore, CTO/CIO, Moosejaw

Thrashed Cursor

Find out how Yakima Chief Hops was able to proactively identify 30% of defects before customers were impacted by monitoring frustration signals and using Fullstory to recreate user experiences. →

Pinch-to-Zoom

Refreshed

“Fullstory has changed the way we work. We’ve gotten so much value out of the tool across teams, from our Business Intelligence (BI) team using Data Export to enrich their data models, to being able to quantify the impact of pain points on our site, to smoother communication between customer support and product. It’s been a game-changer and we love it.”
- Matthew LeGare, Senior Director of Digital Product Management, Younique Products

Discover your most engaging content and product areas

While fixing friction is hugely important, another critical piece of the puzzle is exploring how your users are engaging with your content–and to what result.

Scroll Depth

Highlighted

Element Visibility

“Fullstory comes up in every voice of customer meeting. We are able to walk people through the actual pain points shoppers are facing and show what we found and how we were able to quickly resolve the issue. Or how we plan to improve the digital experience to add more value for shoppers.”
Yi Cao, Senior Manager, Product Research, Hudson’s Bay Company

Learn how Fullstory can help you create a more perfect digital experience.

Performance as a feature: How to evaluate the speed and reliability of your digital experience platform

The Fullstory Team — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 06:00:00 GMT

Before you can embark on a digital experience initiative, you have to start with a foundation of fast, reliable web performance.

You can streamline UX and conversion flows all day, but none of it matters if your site is painfully slow. Customers will bounce or give up based on speed alone.

Any third-party service you want to use to optimize your digital experience, from A/B testing to analytics, is going to have some impact on the total load time of your page.

The key is setting a “performance budget”—an allowable tolerance of that impact—and ensuring the solutions you select fit within it.

Your goal should be to reap the rewards of third-party platforms without "breaking the bank" or passing along the costs of poor performance to your customers.

Need to free up room in your performance budget? Start with the basics:

Optimize image and media files
Minify JavaScript
Implement caching
Serve content from a CDN
Remove scripts from third parties no longer in use

What to look for in implementation

Here's what to look for:

Stability and uptime: Does your provider supply an SLA for uptime? Do they alert you proactively if analytics are interrupted?
Client-side processing: Is the script that initiates the service a static script that indexes everything? Or, does it do the heavy lifting, such as event naming or currency conversion, client-side? Does the script increase in size as you want to report new events or metrics?
Perceived performance: Does the script block page rendering? Does it interrupt interactivity with elements on the page?

Digital Experience Intelligence and performance

Fullstory’s Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI) solution is designed for speed and reliability from the ground up.

From one single, tiny recording script (about 58.8 kB, gzipped), customers of Fullstory gain access to 100% complete, instrumentation-free analytics, high-fidelity session replay for every session.

Your team can build new segments, dashboards, or analytics views in Fullstory without needing to further alter the script code. That means no manual instrumentation.

What does this mean for your business?

Start small, stay small

When it comes to DXI, the script won't "balloon" over time as your team analyzes additional data for future business use cases.

In many cases, customers of legacy digital experience tools are unaware of the real size of their script, and that they slowly creep up over time.

Minimize the fetch

Get out of the way

In addition to being small and loading quickly, the Fullstory script also loads asynchronously.

While new updates only happen about once per week, any other requests would receive a response code “304 - Not modified” which takes less than 10 ms to complete.

And, because the script loads asynchronously, it's near impossible for the Fullstory script to impact the availability of your website or web app.

Optimize recording

After the initial recording script loads, Fullstory sits quietly in the background while your users interact with your website or web app.

Understanding performance impact

Verifying perceived performance

In order to get a sense of perceived performance, we recommend you use a synthetic web performance monitoring solution, such as Splunk, Catchpoint, or New Relic Synthetics.

Alternatively, you may choose to use an open-source solution such as Sitespeed.io and create a custom dashboard to watch metrics over time.

Curious to see for yourself?

Quick look: Accelerating your digital experience

Fullstory — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 04:00:00 GMT

DX maturity can be measured across 3 key categories: Alignment, Activations, and Technology.

Fullstory's digital experience data engine

Fullstory — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Accelerate your organization’s digital transformation and drive business success with complete DX data.

Extensibility: Integrated systems, optimal results

Fullstory — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Get a complete overview of Data Export, Data Layer Observer, and a growing ecosystem of integrations.

Fullstory for finance and insurance

Fullstory — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Combine traditional product analytics with powerful qualitative insights with DXI.

Guide to Fullstory privacy and security

Fullstory — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Learn about Fullstory privacy and security, including our industry-leading approach to data collection.

Private by Default

Fullstory — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Learn about Fullstory’s industry-leading, privacy-first approach to DXI for web and mobile.

Fullstory for SaaS

Fullstory — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Get a complete picture of the SaaS customer journey with Digital Experience Intelligence.

Responsibility

Fullstory — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Learn about Fullstory's foundations of privacy and security, so you'll never compromise customer trust.

Detections

Fullstory — Wed, 29 Jun 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Detections enables organizations to proactively preserve user privacy with smart PII monitoring.

Fullstory, GDPR, and you

Fullstory — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 07:00:00 GMT

Last updated November 2020

What should you know when a website or native mobile application uses Fullstory?

Meet Fullstory

What information is recorded?

A website or app using Fullstory may be recording any of the following information:

Usage patterns:

Clicks
Mouse movements
Scrolling
Typing (except sensitive information*)

Usage patterns illuminate areas of a website or app that are confusing or underused, allowing web designers to improve their customer experience and build better features.

Tech specs:

Browser
Device type
Operating system
Resolution
Script errors
IP address**

Bugs and errors are often particular to a specific web browser or device type. This information helps developers build and ship fixes faster.

Navigation

Pages visited
Referrers
URL parameters
Session duration

Knowing the most popular pages and sources of referral traffic help product managers and marketers improve the quality of content and advertising.

Personal information

Data controllers may only send this data with consent or legal basis.

Display name
Email address
App-specific data***

Account information helps web teams understand your unique experience and troubleshoot any problems you may be having.

***Websites using Fullstory choose how much, if any, of their own app’s unique customer data to store in Fullstory.

Does Fullstory use this information for its own purposes?

What rights do I have regarding my information?

Under the GDPR, you have strong rights related to the use of your data, including things like...

knowing what information is being recorded and how it will be used
accessing and viewing the information
having your information erased
correcting the information about you
getting a copy of the information for yourself
restricting specific uses or stopping altogether the usage of your information

However, Fullstory provides a suite of tools to help web teams honor the requests of EU citizens under the GDPR, so they should be well-positioned to fulfill your requests.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and Fullstory

Fullstory — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 06:00:00 GMT

Updated November 2020

About the California Consumer Privacy Act and Fullstory

1. What is the CCPA?

The right of Californians to know what personal information is being collected about them.
The right of Californians to know whether their personal information is sold or disclosed and to whom.
The right of Californians to say no to the sale of personal information.
The right of Californians to access (or request deletion of) their personal information.
The right of Californians to equal service and price, even if they exercise their privacy rights.

2. Does the CCPA apply to your business?

The CCPA applies to companies that “do business” in California and meet ONE or more of these minimum thresholds:
- Has annual gross revenues in excess of 25 million dollars ($25,000,000).
- “Collects” or “Sells” the personal information of 50,000 or more consumers, households or devices.
  - “Collect” - “...buying, renting, gathering, obtaining, receiving, or accessing any ‘personal information’ pertaining to a consumer...actively or passively, or by observing the consumer’s behavior.”
  - “Sell” - “...selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating...a consumer’s personal information...for monetary or other valuable consideration.”
- Derives 50% or more of its annual revenues from selling consumers’ personal information.
The CCPA does not apply when the collection or sale of personal information occurs “wholly outside of California” (See Section 1798.145 (a)(6)).
A covered “business”, as defined by the CCPA, may require its “service provider” to comply with the CCPA if the business shares personal information with the “service provider.” A “service provider” is defined as legal entity that processes information on behalf of a business and to which the business discloses a consumer’s personal information for a business purpose pursuant to a written contract.

What is ‘valuable consideration’?

3. What does the CCPA require of your business?

Have a clear understanding of what constitutes “personal information.”
Update privacy policies to include descriptions of data collection practices and a summary of consumer’s rights under the CCPA. For businesses that sell or otherwise disclose (see above for a definition of “sell”) personal information for a “business practice”:
- The privacy policy must disclose this fact.
- The privacy policy must also contain a link to an “opt-out” page where a consumer can choose for their personal information to not be sold.
Respond to verified consumer requests for information disclosure or deletion within the appropriate window of time.

What does the CCPA consider “personal information?”

The definition of personal information included within the CCPA is quite expansive. The CCPA states that:

“Personal information” means information that identifies, relates to, describes, is capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household.

This only begins to scratch the surface of a very complex topic, but there are more detailed breakdowns of the CCPA’s concept of “personal information” available elsewhere on the web.

We will discuss more about how the CCPA’s requirements and the concept of “personal information” relates to Fullstory and session replay below.

4. How does the CCPA affect your business and Fullstory?

But what about end-users … do I need permission from them to keep using Fullstory?

5. Fullstory data collection and the CCPA

What types of data does Fullstory collect?

It is important that any elements in your digital property that can potentially contain sensitive data are properly excluded from collection.

It is also possible to pass information into Fullstory that was obtained elsewhere. We will discuss this in more detail in a later section.

What does Fullstory do with the data we store on your behalf?

Where is personal information visible in the Fullstory platform?

There are basically two places in the Fullstory platform where it would be possible to view collected personal information. These two places are Session Replay and Data Export.

Session Replay: Session replay is the reproduction of a user’s interactions on a website or web application exactly or as close as possible to how the user actually experienced it. In order for any session replay tool to work, session replay vendors (like Fullstory!) must store users’ digital interactions on websites and apps down to the individual clicks, taps, scrolls, mouse movements, etc. By reproducing these interactions, just how they happened, the result is a DVR-like reproduction of those experiences, just how they happened (Learn how session replay works in our definitive guide).
Replay is useful for all sorts of reasons—e.g. to support customers, debug errors, optimize pages, and more—and offers a totally different level of insight than traditional analytics alone.
Data Export: Fullstory’s Data Export provides a periodic, raw data extract of events that have been recorded for your organization and an API endpoint to retrieve the data extracts. This data set can be used on its own or to supplement existing models that aim to analyze user interactions on a website or app.

Fullstory and personal information

Now, there are two main ways personal information can make its way into Fullstory:

The first way personal information can make its way into Fullstory is through the collection of non-excluded text content in a website or app. This text may be either part of the site, or something typed into a field by an end-user. Either way, this collected text would be visible in a session replay. It is up to you, the Fullstory customer, to ensure any page elements or fields that contain sensitive personal information are properly excluded. We have provided the tools necessary for you to accomplish this and you can read more about that process here.
The second way that personal information can end up in Fullstory is that you can actively send user data like name, email address, company, etc. to Fullstory using one of our APIs (FS.identify or FS.setUserVars) or one of our many integrations. For more information, including best practices, on passing additional end-user data into Fullstory check out our help articles on FS.identify and FS.setUserVars.

But what about IP addresses... are they personal information?

This is a great question because people have a whole range of differing intuitions when it comes to IP address. Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple yes or no on this one.

6. Honoring end-user personal information requests

Let’s dive into some specifics around how Fullstory empowers you to comply with information requests and process user deletions.

Deletion requests

Personal information access requests

Learn more about downloading end-user data files.

7. Does Fullstory offer a Data Processing Agreement (DPA)?

Yes. You can view and sign our DPA online or send your version to privacy@fullstory.com.pgm.c5nprx.cc for review.

8. How will I know if I'm compliant with the CCPA?

Another helpful resource is the CCPA amendment tracker maintained by the International Association of Privacy Professionals.

Consumer survey: The industries that are nailing digital experiences (and which have room to grow)

The Fullstory Team — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 06:00:00 GMT

How 7,000 global consumers rate their digital experiences with 5 key industries

Setting the scene: Consumers want speed and simplicity

1. Retail is ahead of the DX curve

2. The world needs more “simple” digital experiences

3. Consumers are cutting spending in nearly all areas

Summer feature releases enable faster, deeper customer connections

Fullstory — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 04:00:00 GMT

See friction and fix it–fast–with these new features from Fullstory.

Fullstory overview: Action-ready DX insights for every team

Fullstory — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 04:00:00 GMT

The answers you need to build the perfect digital experience.

Journeys

Fullstory — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 04:00:00 GMT

Transform data into insightful journey maps that reveal opportunities to perfect the user experience.

2027 Digital Experience Playbook for Retail & Ecommerce

Fullstory — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:00:00 GMT

Each year we look at the behavioral data we capture to find the trends that matter most for planning ahead. Here's what this year's data reveals about the shopping experience, and what it means for how you plan for 2027.

The decoupling: real breakage vs. shopper frustration
Engagement: longer sessions without deeper intent
The device gap: mobile stability vs. mobile usability
A new kind of noise: agents shopping on your behalf

This is just a glimpse of what the full data reveals.

Experience the complete Digital Benchmark Report 2026 and compare your own data.

2027 Digital Experience Playbook for Retail & Ecommerce

Fullstory — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:00:00 GMT

The decoupling: real breakage vs. shopper frustration
Engagement: longer sessions without deeper intent
The device gap: mobile stability vs. mobile usability
A new kind of noise: agents shopping on your behalf

This is just a glimpse of what the full data reveals.

Experience the complete Digital Benchmark Report 2026 and compare your own data.