What is a customer session and how can I use session information?

Environment:

Sessions, Incidents, Analytics 

Resolution:

The customer session is a record of activity performed by an end-user prior to submitting an Ask a Question request or feedback to the site or published answer. The customer session includes which answers were viewed, the satisfaction rating given for an answer, the session length, and which searches were performed.

Note: Incidents created from incoming email requests and incidents created by a staff member from the administrative pages do not include a customer session.

By reviewing the session, an agent can review which information the end-user viewed prior to submitting a request. Reviewing the session can also give an indication of how reliant end-users are on submitting assistance requests as opposed to first checking the public answers.

Session data is quite valuable when reviewing feedback from customers on a given answer. From the incident created from the feedback, the agent can view the session to see what the user reviewed and searched on. Based on this information, you may wish to edit or update specific answers so that they can be more easily found with specific keywords.

Customer sessions are only accessible for unresolved incidents and for incidents that have been solved for less than 30 days. If the incident is older than 30 days AND IN A RESOLVED STATE, there is a good chance that the session information has been removed from the incident.

Accessing and viewing session data: 

By default the session data displays on a Web Visit tab when editing an incident. Open the incident and click the Web Visit tab. Click the link to open the viewed answer in a separate page.

Web Visit location within an incident is controlled by the incident workspace used by the staff member. As a result, the Web Visit feature may be located on a different tab or may have been removed from the workspace for some reason.

If you have customized the workspace and deleted the sessions tab you can add it back in:

The "Web Visit" tab (available on the canned incident workspace) is not a special control or relationship item, it is a regular Report Control using the canned "Incidents Web Visit Tab" report (report ID 9035).

1. Open the Workspace you want to customize
2. Add a new tab and name it Web Visit
3. Add the 'Report' control found under the Insert Control tab.  The 'Report' control was added by dragging and dropping it under the Web Visit tab
4. Under the Design tab, left click on the report icon
5. Add the 'Incidents Web Visit Tab' report found at the following path:
   Public Reports > Service > Views - Service > Editor Reports - Service > Incidents Web Visit Tab

Tracking session activity: In addition, the Visit Tracking report (report ID 37) gives a high-level perspective of the traffic flow on your end-user interface. This report includes the average session length in terms of time and in page turns. You can see how your users transition between the pages and how long they spend on average on each page.

Though this report tracks all end-user sessions, the report does not provide data granularity for specific end-users. It is not possible for this report to link session histories to specific users. Instead, the report is designed to give more general session data about the overall usage of your site.