The 3 Safe and Reliable Ways to Handle User Impersonation During Customer Support
When in the early startup stages, everyone on the team works on things well beyond the scope of their job title so that chaos can be minimized. Customer support is no different. In the early days, it’s quite common to have the entire team handle customer inquiries without a proper schedule or structure in place.
Once your startup starts turning into a scaleup, people start getting better-defined roles and responsibilities. There will be a dedicated customer support and success team, operating within specific processes and tools. Things get even more formal once the company starts preparing for an IPO, which requires compliance with many regulations.
What is user impersonation?
User impersonation allows you to see the in-app context of a particular user temporarily. In essence, you’re able to see what they see.
There are many reasons why you might want to impersonate a user. To name a few:
- To troubleshoot an issue: Different users see different UI based on their account preferences and settings, and you’ll need to impersonate the user to be able to see what they see.
- To apply changes: You want to make changes on behalf of another user (for example, the user is away on vacation, and you want to manage their orders or run a report).
- For a preview: You’re an administrator who’s setting up user roles, and you want to preview what users will be able to see depending on the permissions you grant them.
When done correctly, user impersonation can be a massive time saver for your support and engineering teams, since they don’t need to rely on user explanations and screenshots which significantly cuts the time wasted on back-and-forth communication.
User impersonation in early-stage companies
During a company’s early days, the approach to problem-solving is ad hoc, since startups usually don’t have large budgets for proper tools. Plus, the company is iterating very rapidly on every possible aspect of its operations.
There are many workarounds for support teams that need to resort to user personification to solve a customer issue. A popular although an inadvisable approach is by logging in with the profile of the customer.
Depending on the industry, this approach is bound to create legal problems for some companies. What’s more, by logging in with the customer’s profile, the support agent still has to follow the same steps the customer made to replicate their scenario. This might not always be possible, especially when the product is dependent on some time-driven change — for example, a trading app which relies on the stock market data.
User impersonation as the company matures
Once the company scales up, logging with your customer profiles is something you can no longer do. Especially if you’re preparing for an IPO or need to comply with regulatory restrictions. GDPR is an example of such regulation, where you have to be extremely careful with personally identifiable data.
Fortunately, there are accurate, safe, and reliable ways to do user impersonation. How you’ll decide to go about it depends entirely on your organizational structure and budgets.
Building a custom solution
One way to tackle the impersonation problem is by building an in-house solution, specifically crafted for your product. The tool should be able to replicate any user environment based on some user identifier. Since the tool would be built specifically for your product, it’s highly likely that it will be able to avoid all of the technical limitations that are imposed by directly logging in with the real profile of your user.
Also, this helps you abide by the legal framework that your company needs to follow.
This approach, however, has three major downsides:
- Engineering resources: You need to shift engineering resources from other core initiatives or expand the engineering team to secure the necessary capacity to build the user impersonation tool.
- Maintenance: On top of the initial investment, this tool has to be maintained as your product evolves, which means that it’s not a one-off investment but rather an operational expense.
- Proneness to issues: A mediocre implementations or one that fails to strictly follow the legal frameworks might result in a legal argument for your company.
Screen-sharing solution
A cheaper and highly reliable alternative to building a custom tool is the adoption of a screen-sharing solution. With screen sharing, you can not only watch what is happening on your customer’s screen but also directly interact with them and help them achieve their goal. Screen-sharing is a widely adopted approach for user impersonation.
Unlike building a custom solution, if you purchase a license for some screen-sharing software, you won’t invest any of your engineering resource in building and maintaining additional software.
Just like building a custom solution, screen-sharing has its downsides:
- Sensitive data: You have no control over the type of data the screen-sharing solution will be collecting. If there is some sensitive data such as banking details, for example, your support agent might not have the right to access it. No matter whose mistake it is — your user’s or your support agent’s, sensitive data can easily fall into the wrong hands.
- Handling product bugs: If it turns out that there is a product bug and your dev team needs to do the user impersonation, they can’t see what happened during the screen-sharing session unless the support agent made an extra effort to record it.
- Geographic dispersion of screen-sharing solutions: People around the world use different screen-sharing solutions such as WebEx, Teamviewer, Zoom, etc. If your company has adopted a solution which is not suitable for your customer, it creates additional friction for them — they need to install + set up yet another tool. This is a common reason why users decline screen-sharing sessions.
- Limited permissions: If you’re planning to do a screen-sharing session with an enterprise-level customer, they should have everything set up before the call since it’s highly likely that the person you’ll talk to won’t have the permissions to install software on their machine during the session.
You can read more about the downsides of using screen-sharing during customer support.
Interactive co-browsing
Co-browsing is an excellent alternative to screen-sharing when it comes to user impersonation and customer support in general.
An interactive co-browsing solution allows you to interact with your customer’s screen with just a click of a button, without any downloads and installations. This removes the entire setup friction starting a support session.
The co-browsing solutions get integrated directly into your product via a small JavaScript snippet (like Google Analytics). Yes, there is some small effort when adding the code, but it eliminates the need to do anything in the future. The great thing about co-browsing solutions (at least the good ones) is that they have zero impact on your web app’s performance due to the way the technology works.
Here is how interactive co-browsing solves the issues screen-sharing solutions create:
- Sensitive data: Co-browsing allows you to mark different parts of your product as sensitive in advance so that when the support session starts, all of the data will be properly hidden. Not only is it hidden visually, but it also doesn’t leave the browser of the user.
- Handling product bugs: Some co-browsing solutions offer the functionality to record the support session automatically while it takes place. The support agent can link it to Jira or another issue tracking solution, making it easy for the engineering team to replay the session and see what actually happened to the user.
- Geographic dispersion of screen-sharing solutions: Since co-browsing is integrated directly in your web app, there is no need for the end-user to install and configure any additional software. It works out-of-the-box.
- Limited permissions: Same as above!
SessionStack is an interactive co-browsing solution that can be easily integrated with your current support solutions and seamlessly fits into your workflow.
Curious how SessionStack can improve your customer service? 🤔 Take a look around 👉here.
