Case Study: How ViewingFeedback Proves Vendor Engagement with Session Replay

Estate and letting agents live or die by one perception: is the vendor’s property actually being worked? Every viewing, every piece of feedback, every follow-up call is evidence — but only if the vendor sees it.

ViewingFeedback solves the collection half of that problem. After a viewing, it prompts the buyer or tenant for feedback and rolls it into a vendor report the agent can send on. What it couldn’t easily answer, until recently, was the question every agent gets asked at the worst possible moment: “Did the vendor actually open this?”

The gap between sent and seen

A vendor report landing in an inbox isn’t proof of anything. Agents were telling ViewingFeedback the same thing in different words: a delivery receipt doesn’t win an argument with a vendor who says “I’ve heard nothing from you in three weeks” — even when three reports went out.

Open and click tracking on the email got them partway there. It confirmed a vendor had opened the message, but not whether they’d read the feedback, skimmed the summary, or bounced off after the first line.

Adding session replay to the vendor report

ViewingFeedback now records sessions on the vendor report page itself using UserTapes, and surfaces a simple signal back to the agent: how long the vendor spent on the report, which viewings’ feedback they actually scrolled to, and whether they opened the PDF. That turns a vague “did they look at it” into something an agent can point to directly.

It’s a small integration — a few lines of JavaScript on a page that already existed — but the effect on agent conversations was immediate. Instead of “we sent your report on Tuesday,” the agent can say “you spent four minutes on Tuesday’s report and read the feedback on the two flats” — which is a very different conversation with a vendor who thinks nothing is happening.

Why replay instead of just more analytics

ViewingFeedback already had page-level analytics before this. What replay added wasn’t a bigger number, it was a specific answer to a specific dispute: when a vendor claims they never saw something, the agent (or ViewingFeedback’s own support team, when a complaint escalates) can pull up the actual session and settle it in seconds rather than trading emails.

That’s the pattern that tends to justify session replay over dashboards alone — not routine monitoring, but the handful of moments a week where someone needs to know exactly what a specific user did, not just that they were active.

The takeaway for teams building client-facing reports

If your product’s value depends on a client believing something was delivered and consumed — a report, a proposal, a dashboard — clickthrough and open rates only cover the first half. Recording the page the report lives on is often a smaller lift than it sounds, and it’s the difference between telling a client “it was sent” and showing them what they did with it. ViewingFeedback’s vendor reports feature is a good example of a report built specifically to be shown, not just sent.

Related reading: how to reproduce a bug a user reported and what a rage click actually tells you.