Tealeaf: Visibility. Insight. Answers.

Gorillas in the Mist

By John Kim, Product Management —

Before reading further, watch the video. The goal is to count how many times people wearing white pass a ball around. The video is only 90 seconds. Go ahead, I'll wait.



If you watched at least 45 seconds of it, you should've noticed the gorilla. If you didn't watch past 45 seconds, you may have ADHD. If you didn't see the gorilla, don't worry, most people don't see the gorilla. All they see is amazing lack of athleticism by the people passing the ball (the Harlem Globetrotters they are not). This phenomenon is called "inattentional blindness." Basically, you only see what you expect to see and completely ignore the unexpected. Everybody does it.

Is the World of Analytics Blind?
This phenomenon is especially true in the world of analytics. With most analytics suites, you're not actually looking at what the users are doing. You're seeing only a small subset of those metrics that you have specifically instrumented your system to track (i.e. actions that you expected enough to instrument). Not only that, you're not even seeing the actual behavior, just abstract, numerical representations of the behavior. It gives new meaning to the term "double blind." The issue is that it is the unexpected issues that cause a large percentage of usability problems. Because if you knew something was a problem, you would’ve done something about it already, right?

When the Customer Isn't Right: Protect Your Business from Fraud

By Wendy Roth, Education Manager —

For some companies, going to great lengths to satisfy customers is the stuff legends are made of. I'm sure you've heard of the department store that accepts the return of a shirt that is not only old and worn, but that wasn't even sold at the store. When every negative tweet can grow to be a PR disaster, it can seem easier to just give in and say the customer is always right.

But what if the customer isn't right? Or isn't even a customer, for that matter? In the old days, thieves had to actually go to the bank because that's where the money was. But nowadays, they can steal money from your business without even leaving their living rooms.

So how do you distinguish semi-legitimate customers with a shirt to return from the real thieves? Here's how three businesses used Tealeaf to identify and limit fraud on their websites:

Tealeaf's New Year Resolutions for 2012

By Janet Jaiswal, Senior Director of Product Marketing —

Earlier this week we gave some suggested New Year's resolutions for retailers on how to improve their mobile channels. It got us thinking that perhaps we ought to have some resolutions of our own.

As we reflect on what we've achieved and what we've learned from our customers, analysts and industry colleagues in 2011, we are energized as we look forward to the year ahead of us. We expect that even more companies will realize the importance of providing a well-integrated customer experience across channels—mobile, website, through a contact center or other channels such as Voice of Customer.

Without any further ado, here's our list of resolutions for 2012:

A Few Mobile-Focused New Year's Resolutions for Retailers

By Bob Dever, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing —



Now that the wrapping paper has been recycled, we'd like to suggest a few new year's resolutions for retail executives who want to make the most of their fastest growing digital channel—mobile commerce. These suggestions are based, in part, on the results of the advanced social media analysis we commissioned over the 2011 holiday season:

• Focus on ease of use. Only a small percentage of mobile users feel the ease of use is what they'd expect. That means there's a huge opportunity to make ease of use a competitive advantage, whether for mobile sites or apps. Because of the limited real estate on phone screens, retailers must be as contextual as possible in what they display. It's important to make the shopper's path as easy to navigate as possible.
• Listen. Consumers have many ways of telling retailers (and everyone else) what works and what doesn't—app store reviews, Twitter, Facebook, etc. These consumers are sharing critical information. To improve in mobile retailers need to be open to learning and optimizing based on customer feedback.
• Move from doing things because they are cool to doing things that help customers buy on mobile devices. Think twice before opting for complex processes and always consider a mobile service from the customer's perspective. For instance, consider implementing forms that shift orientation from vertical to horizontal in order to enable easier data entry.
• Understand that the mobile channel is different. To ensure their customers are evangelists instead of naysayers, retailers need a clear understanding of the reality of the mobile experience they provide. They need to uncover the sources of customer struggle and quickly remedy them before additional users are affected. Remember, mobile devices lead to new behaviors—like rotating screens, swiping and varying “folds.” It’s important to correlate customer behaviors with device type in order to pinpoint device-specific issues.

To make 2012 a banner year for your mobile commerce, it's time to tune in to your mobile customers and take a proactive approach to addressing the things that can cause them to struggle across this rapidly growing channel.

Mobile: What's Important to Measure and Why

By Melissa Juan, Mobile Product Manager —



To better understand their users, companies are getting mobile analytics up and running almost as fast as they submit their applications to the marketplace. As traffic in the mobile channel continues to grow (witness the amount of mobile sales on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Free Shipping Day), visibility into what's happening with your customers in this space becomes increasingly important. But is it enough to just apply typical website KPIs to your mobile application? While getting standard metrics—conversion rate, device information and session length—is certainly a good start, these metrics don't paint the whole picture of what's happening with your mobile users. Shopping on a desktop at work or home doesn't compare to shopping on-the-go with a smart phone. The usual metrics that are typically monitored to optimize a website only scratch the surface of the types of data points that are needed to make your mobile application successful.

Here are some additional things you should have insight into in order to make better decisions on making improvements to your mobile application:

Tealeaf Best Practice #4: Mission Impossible? Empowering the Call Center to Capture Untapped Revenue While Improving Customer Satisfaction

By Denise Jack, Director of Best Practices —



Traditionally, online businesses have considered their customer service organizations only as cost centers. That's why many call center experts still claim that the best customer service organizations are the ones that exceed in metrics like call handle time and first call resolution. But what if you can position your customer service team as a strategic asset that can generate revenue as well?

Our most innovative customers are doing just that with Tealeaf. Having recently met with several companies that have deployed Tealeaf within their call centers, I've seen a lot of progress in this area. I've seen call centers in which the agents are using Tealeaf to not only service customers who call in with a specific website issue or inquiry, but also dedicated call center teams that do proactive and targeted outreach to customers who have expressed an intent to make a purchase or book a reservation online but ultimately did not complete the transaction. Using Tealeaf to understand who those customers are and what they were trying to do on the website, these outbound agents aren’t cold calling customers but instead provide an exceptional level of customer service because they understand the customer's intent and interest.

Netflights.com (a brand of Gold Medal Travel and part of the Thomas Cook Group) is a leading UK travel company that has done quite well with this practice in their contact center. Using Tealeaf, Gold Medal Travel set up alerts for customers who have certain basket values and dropped off during the reservation process—e.g., credit card failures or being stuck in a loop. Within seconds of such a website customer struggle occurring, the outbound team receives the customers' session information to an outbound team in the contact center. The outbound agent contacts the customer immediately to attempt to complete the sale over the phone. With the help of this visibility into the online experience, this outbound team now delivers more revenue per hour than any other reservation group at Gold Medal—adding up to nearly $24M annually. The order recovery process now represents 20% of all revenue generated from netflights.com. To read more about Netflights.com, check out the case study.

If your contact center organization is viewed by the business as a pure cost center, consider this strategy as a way to help your business drive additional revenue and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty along the way.

Business Process Scorecards: Your Secret Super Power

By Wendy Roth, Education Manager —



As part of our Best Practices series, this post offers a suggestion on how to use business process scorecards to uncover the root cause of an issue.

Remember when conversion funnel reports were cool? When being able to show what percentage of your visitors dropped out at each step impressed your colleagues? This leaves me wondering: When did they become just okay? No one would ever deny that it's useful to know where prospective customers are falling out of your conversion funnel. But what can you do about it?

Well, you can speculate what the reasons are...or you can use Tealeaf business process scorecards to uncover the true cause. Tealeaf business process scorecards look like mild-mannered web analytics conversion funnels. But don't let the glasses fool you...they have x-ray vision that can see beyond the mere fact that visitors dropped out and reveal the reasons why they did so. Because you can drill into and replay the sessions of those who abandoned the process, you can go beyond your assumptions and view it through the eyes of your customers.

Modern Life is Already a Complex Struggle - Make Your Digital Presence a Struggle-free Zone

Guest post by John W. Kolker, Web Analytics Technical Consultant, Siteworx —

Your organization already has an advanced web presence. It has been tested and there is not a single functionality error. Everything works perfectly and nothing is broken. So why then are you not getting the conversions you want on sales, registrations, subscriptions or any other process you want your digital audience to complete?

The answer is very simple: struggle. Struggle in a digital context can be defined as: The tendency for a digital user/visitor to flounder or otherwise get lost or confused on your site or application and, as a result, to be unable to fully complete a process.

With Tealeaf, struggle is measurable. It used to be that the only way we knew something was "wrong" with a website or application was by tracking errors. Errors certainly influence customer behavior as they react to the erroneous processes, but it is only one part of what makes up a struggle.