Recently, customer analytics company ForeSee released SessionReplay, a tool designed to help businesses improve their mobile websites. Although technology is already available to aid developers in determining what about their websites does or doesn’t work in the form of customer satisfaction surveys, these don’t always provide reliable data. Many users opt not to take the survey, leading to the dreaded selection bias: the customers who take surveys tend to be ones who have had either a very positive or very negative experience, and the average customer becomes underrepresented.

SessionReplay provides a unique method of understanding the customer experience on a mobile website. It tracks the user’s interaction with the site in real-time video format. Actions such as clicking buttons, zooming in and out and scrolling are recorded to be watched later and analyzed.

The only issue with this is that it leads to massive amounts of data to sort through. However, SessionReplay takes care of this with its ability to sense trends within the collected data and provide filtering. If companies want to see how users of their websites treat a certain page, for example, they can choose to see only those results.

The data collected by SessionReplay is combined with data ForeSight has already collected with its other products, like satisfaction scores, to try to provide deeper insight into what areas of the website are most problematic.

SessionReplay’s functionality doesn’t end with telling companies what they’re doing wrong, though. The technology also helps companies correct these issues by allowing for annotations on the videos so that teams can collaborate and discuss solutions more effectively.

This technology comes as smartphone and tablet sales skyrocket and the usage of mobile websites goes up right along with them. For users to return to a site multiple times, they must be satisfied with it, and as John Lovett, senior partner at Web Analytics Demystified stated, “Customer experience solutions that provide both data and visualizations are critical to helping organizations truly gauge the success of mobile sites and apps.”