Executive Summary
Tipalti is the leading global payables solution that streamlines all phases of the accounts payable and payment management workflow in one cloud platform. The company handles over $22 billion in annual payments, allowing their customers — such as Uber, Toast and Twitter — to eliminate up to 80 percent of their supplier payment workload.
With a global customer base — and workforce — the Tipalti team relentlessly strives to deliver the best customer experience across both its support team and its product. But time differences between Tipalti’s customers and its support and engineering teams meant bug fixes often took too long to resolve.
Tipalti turned to LogRocket to eliminate the back and forth between its support and engineering teams and shift to a proactive approach to issue identification and resolution. With LogRocket, Tipalti can fix issues without needing to request additional information from customers. Not only does this dramatically reduce time to resolution, but it also improves customers’ confidence that Tipalti is committed to delivering an exceptional customer experience.
Crossing time zones to solve bugs
Tipalti has a global business. Most of its support team is based in the United States, but its main engineering team, including Chief Architect Stas Vinitsky and Architect Zachary Leighton, are based in Israel — a 10-hour time difference. Support tickets could come in at any time of day, but the window for engineering and support to collaborate on incoming requests was very small.
Before LogRocket, Tipalti’s engineering team would get tickets from support with a description of the issue a customer was experiencing. “We were having customers send us the logs, and we would see if there were errors in the logs,” Stas explained. His team had some context, but it didn’t offer a complete picture of what or why something was happening.
Often, they would need to have multiple conversations with support or the end user before they could fully diagnose an issue. This, combined with the time difference, meant that it often took days to resolve issues.
“LogRocket really helped us understand issues that otherwise would take us much longer, and would require us contacting the client and talking to them several times.”
After implementing LogRocket, both the engineering and support teams could refer to session replays to see exactly what the issues were and how they impacted the end user. In some cases, support was able to quickly identify suspected bugs as user error and walk customers through what they were doing wrong. “LogRocket is a much more proactive way to go about it, and we’re able to potentially push out a fix before they even wake up in the morning,” Stas said.
Having exact sessions and error logs on hand eliminates the back and forth with support and having to reach out directly to users. This is especially true when Tipalti encounters “ghosts in the machine” — instances where there are no errors in the code, but customers are still reporting an issue. By watching LogRocket sessions, Tipalti can get to the root cause of what customers are experiencing.
With the new LogRocket-powered process, Tipalti has been able to resolve significantly more tickets per month by reducing mean time to resolution.
Beating customers to the punch
While LogRocket allows Tipalti to react to customer issues and requests, it also helps them proactively improve their product so that reported issues are fewer and farther between. By leveraging LogRocket session replay and logs, the Tipalti team was able to pick up on issues that go unreported by users, or identify issues before users do.
“Sometimes, a user will have an issue and not report it,” Stas says. “If we uncover a critical issue, we can fix it right away. Or, if we notice that it’s something we need to fix soon, but not necessarily immediately, LogRocket gives us the insight to prioritize accordingly.”
“If there’s an issue with a new feature we’re rolling out, we can get to fixing it immediately. Not waiting for the customer to say, ‘I went to use some feature and it didn’t work, why is that?’ We can offer them preemptive support.” -Stas
To better track issues as they occur, Tipalti has set up LogRocket alerts to let them know when things go awry. When KPIs such as memory usage or page load time exceed a certain threshold, the team gets Slack notifications letting them know what’s happening. “We used to get messages from the support team and then we would have to look and see what was going on,” says Zach. “But as we started adding alerts, we could let support know before they let us know.”
“At one point, we were sitting by waiting for issues to be reported. Now we’re able to say, ‘We noticed something’s going on. We’re fixing it,’ or ‘It’s already resolved.’” -Zach
Tipalti’s proactive issue response through LogRocket allows the team to avoid the fire drills associated with customer-reported issues. “It comes across as more professional and provides a better support experience,” says Zach. “If someone messages support, the communication is ‘I know something is going on,’ ‘I know exactly what’s going on and when it’ll be fixed,’ or ‘It’s already resolved,’ instead of ‘Let me check on that for you.’”
Keeping PII safe
As a player in the financial technology industry, Tipalti’s users often enter highly personal information. LogRocket’s data sanitization tools allow engineering and support to watch sessions and collect insights without compromising customers’ PII.
“LogRocket allows us to give people access to see what’s going on, but it’s all been sanitized, it’s all been redacted. That’s a better alternative than even sitting there watching with the customer because you would actually see account numbers and other personal data.”
Previously, they would need to sit with the customer in a live session — which often meant watching the customer input sensitive information.
“With LogRocket,” Stas explained, “we can see what you’re doing, but all the things that are sensitive — personal, financial or otherwise — have been redacted, and we won’t be able to see that.”
With faster issue resolution, proactive issue identification and a more private user experience, LogRocket quickly became a win not just for Tipalti, but for their users as well.
Enabling beta rollouts
Beta testing used to be an arduous process due to the time difference between Tipalti’s engineers and their users.
Before LogRocket (and COVID-19), Zach would go from Israel to California for weeks at a time. “I’d just sit there and work with implementations on a beta feature because the time lag between Israel and San Francisco was so great that it was taking two days to present an issue.”
“LogRocket allows us to babysit beta users and see what they are doing and using, rather than having to follow up with them retrospectively.” -Zach
LogRocket helps to both identify issues and see how customers are using new features, without needing to spend days talking to beta users. When making a large infrastructure change to Tipalti’s payer portal, “we tested everything internally to make sure things worked, but in the real world things don’t always act as you expect,” says Zach. “So we use LogRocket to follow those initial beta customers.”
Tipalti monitors how customers are using the beta release. “Are they going in and using the new features? And if they are, are there any issues? Did everything work as expected?” LogRocket “gave us a lot of confidence that things were working in production,” identifying not just any issues with the deployment, but also errors caused by specific user configurations, browser settings, or other edge cases.
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