foreUP does more with LogRocket

TL;DR

foreUP encountered too many bugs that were difficult if not impossible to reproduce. “We kind of dismissed the idea of a session replay or monitoring solution being a possibility a year or two ago,” said foreUP CTO Brendon Beebe.

Why was this type of solution dismissed? In addition to the fact that foreUP users are in the system for 12–14 hours at a time, foreUP has 300–400 settings that modify how their software works.

This breadth and duration of user sessions coupled with the inherent complexity of foreUP’s system made it difficult for engineers to resolve issues. Brendon was planning on hiring two additional QA engineers, as he felt this was his best option to reduce the time to resolution for reported errors.

It was right around this time Brendon and his team attended SaaStr, where foreUP encountered LogRocket for the first time. Despite little success with similar solutions in the past, foreUP gave LogRocket a chance.

“It’s incredible the accuracy LogRocket gives, especially with those incredibly long sessions,” said Brendon. “LogRocket is essentially replacing a hire or two, which is really nice. It’s been a company-wide thing, to be honest.”

When you don’t know what’s causing technical issues

Established in 2012, foreUP is a cloud-based, all-in-one suite of management solutions for golf courses and clubs to manage point of sale, players, tee times, inventory, food and beverage, billing, and more.

“It’s a pretty big system, and generally when people are using the system, they are in it all day,” says Brendon. With so many settings, each instance could behave differently, which then compounds the difficulty in pinpointing and reproducing user issues.

This range of uses, coupled with daylong sessions in excess of 12 hours is what initially discouraged Brendon from using other session replay solutions. Brendon felt that they were just not accurate due to data loss, and because the sheer volume of sessions made it very difficult to find errors.

Having spent years in the software industry, Brendon is well acquainted with what happens when you can’t reproduce errors, fix complex issues, or see how customers are using your application. foreUP was ready to hire two more QA engineers at their 50-person company, as adding more resources seemed to be the only solution.

LogRocket helps address technical (and non-technical) issues quickly and directly

Prior to making the additional hires, foreUP turned to LogRocket for insight into what was causing difficult frontend bugs, to quickly reproduce and troubleshoot errors, and to gain insight into the usage of their product.

The accuracy and insight provided by LogRocket “replaced an engineering hire or two.” Brendon and his team can now deploy these resources in ways that will grow their product, rather than taking time to find, replicate, and fix bugs in their software.

1. Stubborn bugs became fixable

Brendon and his team found three bugs with one of our payment processors just because of LogRocket. And they’ve been bugs that we’ve been dealing with since the beginning. We always assumed it was our software, and we couldn't figure out what it was. LogRocket actually helped us track that down.”

In the end, the bugs causing the issue had nothing to do with foreUP’s software. A payment processor foreUP was working with wasn’t properly capturing credit card transactions. This resulted in foreUP’s software having no record of transactions going through, even though the payment processor reported the transactions were fine.

Because of LogRocket, Brendon and his team uncovered that the error stemmed from the request the payment processor sent back to foreUP upon completing a transaction. foreUP had logging on the server side, so once the request hit the server, foreUP would begin logging requests and responses. However, since this was an issue with an iframe, foreUP needed LogRocket to uncover that the payment processor was not sending foreUP what was needed on the client side.

“It wasn’t until we got LogRocket that we were able to dive into several miscellaneous edge cases and get them resolved.”
2. Troubleshoot errors quickly and effectively

Before LogRocket, foreUP support found it difficult to replicate user-reported errors, and lacked the context to determine whether their tickets represented actual bugs or user errors. To better address these issues, foreUP rolled out LogRocket to the entire support team.

Now, when an issue is reported to support, foreUP’s policy is to provide the session recording to engineering along with the issue to show exactly how it occurred. But if the issue is due to user error, support can resolve the ticket without engineering. “It’s been a huge life saver for us,” said Brendon.

3. Gain insight into the usage of their product

Brendon noted that the benefits of LogRocket go beyond bug fixing. “Even the product team benefits,” says Brendon. “Our product team used LogRocket for the rollout of our new food and beverage software.” The product team watched session recordings to gain a better understanding of how foreUP’s customers were using the new software.

And it doesn’t stop at the product team: LogRocket has become an integral part of foreUP’s customer success team. “Our account managers would come to support all the time for questions as they’re working with their clients through problems or issues — ‘How did the users do this? How is this possible?’ ” Brendon says. “Not necessarily bugs or errors, but just wondering, how did they do this?”

Now, foreUP account managers use LogRocket to see what users did, where they get lost in the software, and how they ran into a certain situation. Thanks to LogRocket, the foreUP account managers are better equipped to resolve customer product usage issues.

LogRocket does more than fix bugs

With LogRocket, foreUP isn’t just fixing bugs faster than ever — they have gained unparalleled insight into how customers experience their software on a day-to-day basis.

"The entire company is really using it,” says Brendon. “It’s been a company-wide thing, to be honest.”

Just as golf courses and clubs rely on foreUP to provide their customers with an amazing experience, foreUP relies on LogRocket to build an amazing user experience.

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

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LogRocket Customer Story: foreUP