We all know that calling customer service to report a glitch may be an awful experience. Maybe you just clicked on something and the whole website crashed for no reason, and you wonder what the hell you did during your past life to deserve this (as a WordPress user, I can easily relate to this scenario).
What we usually don’t know is that dealing with web bugs may be an awful experience not only for who’s reporting them, but also for the people who have to fix the errors.
Matt Arbesfeld and Ben Edelstein, recent graduates in computer science who both interned at Google, have developed a tool - named LogRocket - that takes the side of developers instead of customers.
"The problem we’re solving is, how do we let developers build the best possible customer experience.”
The two lifelong friends, who have been working on different types of apps together, noticed one recurrent issue. When users would report bugs, they would spend a lot of time trying to understand what went wrong, asking for detailed explanations or screenshots of the webpage. “It was hard for us, as engineers… to, kind of, get down to the root causes of what was happening,” CEO and co-founder Arbesfeld said.
So here’s what they think might solve their problem. When companies buy the LogRocket solution, everything that each customer does on their website is recorded in a video. To get started, companies need to add a single line to their code, according to Arbesfeld.
When something doesn’t work, developers can go to an admin dashboard, search for a specific session, replay the video and check exactly where, when and what happened following the user’s actions.
The assumption here is that an unbiased recording will put developers in the best conditions to understand the problem. The advantage would be that developers will not have to sustain long conversations with customers, which may lead to misunderstandings and consequential waste of time.
“Developers' time is one of the most important things in the world,” Arbesfeld said. “The problem we’re solving is, how do we let developers build the best possible customer experience.”
Whether or not users are made aware that their actions on a company’s website are recorded depends on the company, Arbesfeld said. Some do inform their users, but others don’t.
Launched in March 2017, LogRocket - headquartered in Kendall Square with four employees - won’t disclose its funding sources. However, it’s part of the family of Rough Draft Ventures, the VC fund for student startups backed by General Catalyst.
Fun fact: To decide the name of the company, Arbesfeld and Edelstein wrote a script that went through any available “.com” domain that contained the word “log.” And that’s how the name “LogRocket” was selected.
Photo provided.
