The technology industry is ever-evolving. And the skills needed to keep moving it forward are changing as well. One instance of this that’s dear to Fullstory’s heart is the rise of the Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI) Engineering role.
Recently, we chatted with Sorcha McNamee, DXI Engineer at Bazaarvoice, about what this title means to her and how Fullstory’s Digital Experience Intelligence platform is making an impact at her organization.
When she began her career at Bazaarvoice, Inc.—the leading provider of product reviews and user-generated content (UGC) solutions—in a user-focused Quality Assurance role, Sorcha describes having an “aha moment” when she realized that she could watch user sessions to more precisely understand what users experienced. Though she could view these sessions and cobble together insights with several different DX tools, until her team implemented Fullstory, Sorcha was unable to see a holistic picture of the digital experience.
“User interviews can be skewed,” said Sorcha. “Using DXI tools and techniques provides us with more context and more accuracy to make data driven decisions.”
So, how does DXI engineering play out day-to-day at Bazaarvoice? Read on to have all your questions answered.
Wait—what is a DXI engineer?
In sum, the purpose of DXI is to enable more perfect digital experiences. Accordingly, it follows that a DXI engineer is someone responsible for understanding behavior and insights to improve overall customer experience.
At Bazaarvoice, Sorcha acts as a sort of cross-functional DXI coach for product and CX teams—ensuring that they’re employing best practices in analyzing customer behavior.
“I always want to help people around the organization see the value in DX data by showing them value through use cases, and hoping they’ll run with it,” said Sorcha.
What kinds of problems does a DXI engineer solve?
When Bazaarvoice recently launched a new product experience, they needed to determine a strategy for migrating users. Sorcha was able to use data from Fullstory to identify which accounts should be prioritized for migration, allowing Bazaarvoice to provide a smooth transition. Other problems Sorcha has used Fullstory to solve include:
Decreasing time to uncover conversion trends, pain points, and bottlenecks
Identifying and targeting friction points to continually improve UX
Eliminating data silos by integrating Fullstory with other tools being used
How does a DXI engineer work with other teams?
At Bazaarvoice, Sorcha has sought out and trained at least one “Observability Champion” on each team at the organization. In essence, Observability Champions are responsible for helping to embed observability and DXI into daily processes and practices in their part of the organization, as opposed to it being an afterthought.
While they started with Observability Champions for engineering, product, and design teams, they’ve scaled to CX and product marketing champions as well.
Sorcha will often host sessions where champions can come and tell success stories from their team. For example, before launching a new feature to clients, a team released the feature internally and monitored it with Fullstory. The insights they got from the internal release allowed them to be confident that their rollout plan would be successful when launched externally.
What obstacles might a DXI engineer face day-to-day?
For Sorcha, the biggest challenge in observability coaching is getting teams to embrace the DX data that’s available to them. Work can be hectic, and the idea of sifting through data on top of an existing workload feels like a daunting task. It’s easy to brush off as something that there’s simply no time for.
“Before, we were using tools that felt really disjointed and couldn’t show us a complete picture of our digital experience,” said Sorcha. “It was really complicated and time-consuming to get insights. Fullstory has remedied that, which is what I’m conveying to our teams.”
With Fullstory’s DXI platform, there’s no need to sort through heaps of data every day to find meaningful insights. Fullstory capabilities like Signals, which automatically detects over a dozen types of user friction, and Dashboards, which aggregates and monitors metrics at a glance, make extracting actionable insights easy.
How does a DXI engineer use Fullstory day-to-day?
The Bazaarvoice team uses Fullstory in a customer-focused, rather than account-focused, way. In other words, they’re primarily leveraging Fullstory to understand how users are navigating their product, rather than to understand behavior of specific customer accounts. This is particularly beneficial in working with design and engineering teams, who need to understand how users are navigating their product.
Some teams in Bazaarvoice also host "Fullstory Fridays," where cross-functional teams get together to review Dashboards and brainstorm how to improve. Because Fullstory can track customer interactions on a granular level, Sorcha says she finds it easy to slice and dice their DX data in meaningful ways.
“It’s really exciting to be able to do this type of work and help other teams understand our DX data,” Sorcha said. “It’s a big project, and we have big plans for using DXI to continue improving our products.”
Fullstory’s Digital Experience Intelligence platform proactively surfaces where users experience confusion or frustration.
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