FullStory: Empowering brands with a complete look into digital experience data
About FullStory
FullStory offers a digital experience intelligence (DXI) platform that helps companies pinpoint and solve the biggest challenges customers have with their websites and mobile applications, so they can eliminate pain points for their users, build better digital experiences, and generate more sales.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usFullStory developed its digital experience intelligence (DXI) platform using Google Cloud from day one, enabling the company to build a platform that's scalable, flexible, and secure.
Google Cloud results
- Uses Google Kubernetes Engine to give teams more autonomy, allowing them to manage their workloads more efficiently
- Uses BigQuery as a data warehouse, enabling it to store and process huge amounts of sensitive customer data securely
- Uses Google Workspace to create a coherent and collaborative work culture across departments
- Uses Google Cloud Marketplace to promote its digital experience intelligence platform across more available markets
Processing trillions of customer events with ease in GKE
"The customer is always right" has been a guiding sales principle for businesses around the world for decades. That's why the best companies put so much effort into building a great customer experience (CX), in-store and online. With the growing importance of ecommerce, delivering a joined-up customer experience that works across various different digital touchpoints (mobile, websites, social media) is vital. Companies now need to invest in digital experiences that keep the customer coming back for more. But with research showing that approximately 70% of shoppers abandon their cart before completing their online purchases, any moment of friction can cost brands, who won't know when or why a customer left. FullStory is helping companies find the answers.
FullStory is a leading player in the nascent Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI) market. The company's DXI platform combines in-depth analytics, session detail, and collaboration tools to help companies understand what's working, and what's not, with their digital experiences. For example, FullStory can help companies track when people are repeatedly, and rapidly, clicking on one button because of frustrating time lags (so-called "rage clicks") or when a click leads a person down a digital dead-end. These insights can be invaluable for FullStory's customers, and fixing these problems can help them see big boosts in revenue or dramatic efficiency improvements.
"Our clients know that they really need to understand what's working for their customers and what isn't," says Michael Morrissey, Chief Technology Officer, FullStory. “And the ability to turn FullStory on and quickly start getting valuable insights is why we have such a broad range of different clients, from GAP to Forbes."
The company was originally founded in 2014 by a small team of former Google engineers, so it was no surprise when FullStory chose Google Cloud to be its cloud provider. "The team had big ambitions from the get-go," says Morrissey. "They knew that Google Cloud could help fulfill those ambitions, as it's easy for developers to use and was the type of tech stack we really wanted to build on."
"The team had big ambitions from the get-go. They knew that Google Cloud could help fulfill those ambitions, as it's easy for developers to use and it was the type of tech stack we really wanted to build on."
—Michael Morrissey, CTO, FullStoryBuilding an intuitive, scalable DXI platform
From day one, the FullStory team worked with Google Cloud to build its infrastructure. FullStory now runs all its services in Google Cloud, and it's been vital at every step of the DXI platform's evolution.
During those early stages of development the company's team of engineers used App Engine to write all of their code. As FullStory grew, so did the demands on its initial team of 10 engineers. They were spending more and more time dealing with underlying hardware issues, but Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) helped solve these problems. GKE is a simple way to automatically deploy, scale, and manage Kubernetes.
"Google Kubernetes Engine quickly allowed us to accelerate our development by smoothing out the mountain of complexity that comes with having to manually maintain every aspect of our system," says Morrissey. GKE does most of the heavy lifting by auto-updating the underlying operating system on the host machines, and it continues to help FullStory evolve.
The GKE integration has enabled FullStory to create an effective feedback loop, so teams can manage themselves, from their availability to their budgets. Dan Kuebrich, VP of Platform Engineering, FullStory, has witnessed first-hand how GKE has allowed different teams to manage their own operations. "We run more than 100 services in our production environment, and there are about a dozen teams on call to maintain those services," says Kuebrich. "And they can control things like the resource allocation or choose what virtual machines they want to run."
The FullStory team can now focus on what they excel at, rather than spend valuable time and manpower maintaining large clusters of machines. "We have trillions of user interactions per year that come into FullStory. So, it's really about scale," says Kuebrich. "With Google Kubernetes Engine we trust that we can operate securely at this scale, and that's a big win for us and our customers."
"We have trillions of user interactions per year that come into FullStory. So, it's really about scale. With Google Kubernetes Engine we trust that we can operate securely at this scale, and that's a big win for us and our customers."
—Dan Kuebrich, VP of Platform Engineering, FullStoryAnalyzing trillions of events
FullStory's unique autocapture automatically logs every user interaction retroactively. This way, brands have full visibility to also uncover the "why" behind issues and opportunities, and track key metrics over time. FullStory sends data to Google BigQuery with its Data Destinations to add DXI to AI modeling and ML analytics. This combined power of industry-leading autocapture and search capabilities empowers customers to know what questions to ask and gives them the most robust user data set available when making data-backed decisions.
FullStory's no-code, low-dev implementation means a quick time to value and company-wide data alignment. In 2022, FullStory analyzed 1.44 trillion total events, 79 billion pages, and 25 billion sessions (including 22 billion on the web and 3 billion on native mobile apps). In terms of Total Active Time, this amounts to the equivalent of more than 80,000 years of user activity.
Helping more companies build better digital experiences
FullStory is also now on Google Cloud Marketplace, making its DXI platform more broadly available worldwide. By combining the power of FullStory with Google Cloud solutions, including BigQuery, Google Analytics, and Google Optimize, businesses can access the most robust level of digital experience and analytics data possible without collecting sensitive user information.
"This is a natural step for us. There are so many companies who are already using Google Cloud, and they want to explore what DXI can offer them. Being on Google Marketplace makes it far easier for them to discover FullStory," says Morrissey. "And it lowers the barrier for people to adopt our platform." More details about the move to Google Marketplace are available on the FullStory blog.
Putting security at the heart of everything
Data is the key to FullStory's success. Its DXI platform delivers a complete, retroactive view of how people interact with each customer's website or app. This is how the platform can pinpoint the most critical points in a user's journey. But it means analyzing huge amounts of data.
FullStory uses Cloud BigTable as a primary source of storage on the frontend, and BigQuery as its data warehouse. The company also uses Looker and BigQuery together to power its data analysis. When dealing with such sensitive data, security is paramount, and that was another reason why FullStory chose Google Cloud. The company could trust its stringent security measures to keep its customers' data safe. "We were a very security conscious organization from day one. And as we had many years of experience working for Google, we knew just how seriously it took security, internally and externally," says Morrissey. "We knew that there was no platform that was more secure for our needs than Google Cloud."
Creating a collaborative, talent-focused working culture
With such a strong core of former Google employees working at the company, they have inevitably brought positive elements of the Google working culture with them. "There were two central tenets that I saw in the culture at Google, that FullStory had in its DNA from the very start," says Gabby Sirner-Cohen, Chief People Officer, FullStory. "The first was to hire amazing people, and they will amaze you. And the second was that you default to open sharing of information with those people, and trust that they're going to do really fantastic things with that guidance."
The FullStory team's valuable experience previously working for Google has given them a unique insight into Google solutions, and has directly influenced the ethos of FullStory's working culture. That's why the company has been using Google Workspace since its early days as a startup, working with all of its tools, from Google Sheets to Google Docs. "The cohesion between Google Workspace and Google Cloud allows our teams to work in a more fluid fashion," says Morrissey. "We're not working across different platforms, with different security measures; everything just fits together."
Beyond the day-to-day culture at FullStory, there is a broader ambition at the company to drive digital and omnichannel revenue growth and help organizations become more customer-centric and data-driven.
FullStory is continually looking at new ways to evolve its DXI platform, help clients build better digital experiences, and maybe even put an end to "rage clicks." The company is excited to explore the possibilities of what it can achieve on Google Cloud. "Right now, the next layer for us involves developing more and more sophisticated machine learning models," says Morrissey. "We're currently working closely with Google Cloud on this next step, and we couldn't be more excited about what lies ahead."
"The cohesion between Google Workspace and Google Cloud allows our teams to work in a more fluid fashion. We're not working across different platforms, with different security measures, everything just fits together."
—Michael Morrissey, CTO, FullStoryTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About FullStory
FullStory offers a digital experience intelligence (DXI) platform that helps companies pinpoint and solve the biggest challenges customers have with their websites and mobile applications, so they can eliminate pain points for their users, build better digital experiences, and generate more sales.