LogRocket offers Branch unparalleled visibility into their platform

TL;DR

Joe Emison, the CTO and co-founder of Branch, had been using a session replay solution for debugging, but it wasn’t enough. “We were a happy customer of a different session replay solution, but it didn’t have automated connections and linking with Sentry,” Joe said.

Whenever Sentry surfaced an error, Joe and his team would have to “manually sync Sentry and our session replay solution, then guess why the error was occurring.” This slowed down the Branch team when it came to evaluating the health of its platform. Around this time, Joe discovered LogRocket.

“LogRocket is magic. I’ve been doing software development on the web for 20 years. The standard question with bugs is, ‘How do I replicate them?’ ”

Joe explained the tedious timeline of replicating and fixing a bug without a solution like LogRocket. “Everyone spends so much time trying to replicate a bug, from customers, to customer support, to the developers themselves.”

“With LogRocket, we live in a world where Sentry can tell you an error happened, and then with LogRocket, you can understand exactly what happened. Done, you replicated it.”

For Joe, fixing bugs was only the beginning; the information provided by LogRocket was extremely useful in deciphering the Branch user’s journey. With LogRocket, Branch now had the ability to quickly identify where their platform was not serving an optimal customer experience.

“The ability to gain an understanding of user behavior when interacting with Branch was far more valuable than other analytic solutions for deciding where we should focus our development efforts to improve the world for our clients.”

Building a business that can iterate quickly

Branch is the fastest way for individuals to bundle home and auto insurance.

“Purchasing bundled home and auto insurance is more tedious than it has to be” Joe said. To bundle home and auto today, most insurance seekers need to speak with multiple individuals before obtaining a quote. Branch has changed this by offering a platform that allows anyone seeking insurance to get a quote for home insurance, auto insurance, or both in seconds via the web.

However, this new, frictionless way of offering insurance has presented new challenges. Bugs in the platform are no longer just an inconvenience; they now ruin the experience for both customers and potential customers.

While Sentry is useful, these errors were still difficult to track down even when using their previous session replay tool.

“Sentry has these tickets that display issues. We then had our session replay tool,” Joe explained. “These being separate, we had to manually sync the Sentry error with the session replay and, finally, guess as to why the error was occuring.

This manual process robbed hours upon hours of precious development time from the Branch engineering team — time that could have been used to enhance the Branch platform and improve its users’ experience.

Enhancing existing Branch processes

“We were using a different session replay solution, but there were a number of things that were important to us that LogRocket did better,” Joe stated. LogRocket’s Sentry integration was a huge upgrade for Branch over its previous process.

“Thanks to the integration between LogRocket and Sentry, debugging is faster and easier than it was with our previous solution. Couple that with the LogRocket developer console being more responsive and precise than it was with our former solution, and LogRocket is much easier to use.”

While LogRocket allowed the Branch engineering team to resolve bugs fast, Joe wanted to push LogRocket further. “Our team was excited that you could see the full Redux state.” With this enhanced visibility from LogRocket’s UI and integrations, Joe looked into an edge case that Branch had been dealing with for weeks.

“We had an error with a Segment event not properly triggering. When the event occurred, someone should have received an email, and they didn’t."

"Thanks to LogRocket, we were able to do a full trace of everything. We learned that the issue was related to Segment dropping the event.”

Joe realized that using LogRocket to quickly address bugs was just the beginning. He wanted LogRocket to be part of a larger goal.

From error reporting to user experience

To deliver on Branch’s mission, Joe and his team needed to be more than just the fastest way to bundle home and auto insurance. Branch also needed to offer an unrivaled buying experience.

“Your ability to deliver delightful products, interfaces, and experiences is directly related to how quickly you can cycle through experiments with what works for customers.”

Joe and his team began using LogRocket for projects that focused on user adoption and user experience. He found several advantages when using LogRocket to evaluate the Branch platform. “One thing you unlock with LogRocket is the ability to interpret user behavior in a real-world environment,” he said.

User testing is integral to the creation of a great product at Branch. Throughout his career, Joe always looked to gain insight from user testing and user groups. While he valued the feedback, he always wondered whether the insights he obtained were skewed due to the unnatural environment of a user group.

Thanks to LogRocket, Joe no longer had to rely solely on these two groups. “LogRocket provides Branch with invaluable information, gathered from users interacting with Branch in the real world. We now get a much better understanding of what our users are doing on our platform.”

New insights in hand, Joe and his team began quickly optimizing Branch to meet the needs of its new and existing customers.

“There is a large volume of traffic that comes to our site. Without LogRocket, it would be impossible to know, ‘Where did our users get hung up?’ Combine these LogRocket insights with some requests we receive through in-application chats, and we know exactly where a user issue occurred.”

“It’s the bandwidth of information that we are constantly receiving at Branch about users who visit our site that is fantastic. This only allows us to build them a better experience. LogRocket is part of our ability to do this.”

Staying ahead of the competition

While Branch currently bundles home and auto insurance faster than the competition, Joe knows that he cannot rest on the status quo. He and his team must constantly iterate and enhance the Branch platform. With LogRocket, Joe can collect the user information he needs to maintain their competitive advantage.

If you’d like to see how LogRocket can transform your business, like it did for Branch,

Learn how other teams use LogRocket.

Sign up, it's free!

3 min installation - Try all features free for 14 days - Cancel at any time

LogRocket Customer Story: Branch Insurance